Sweetwater
by scotchplaid
Summary: A spin-off of the Journey stories. It's 1895, some six years after the events of Journey's End, and a new editor for the Sweetwater Journal has come to town. While there will be some B&W and a return of characters from the first two stories, this fic will center on Liesl, an original character from the fics, and Audra, a wholly new character.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N - Yes, this will have some B &W, but it won't really be about them, just as this fic won't have murders or trials. While it takes place in the same (very) faux 19th century world of the Journey fics, it has its own path. I want to do something a little different with this fic, maybe explore, a little more, a created world, and fix these two women firmly within it. Assume the usual disclaimers - also this is rated "M" so there will be sexual situations (eventually) and occasional strong language.**

 **Prologue**

It was an imposing desk, heavy, dark, ornate, more imposing than the person who was sitting behind it. Not that the woman behind it didn't have an air of authority, she did, but her authority seemed receptive to questions, perhaps even a difference of opinion, whereas the desk, were it a person, suggested an authority that would be absolute, uncompromising. Crushing. Audra had to smother a wry smile at the thought of the desk leaping to pin her to the floor. It was gentler than some of her editors had treated her. Audra might have come to a different opinion about the woman if she weren't uncertainly fingering and then removing her wire-rimmed spectacles as she spoke; the frequency of the gesture implied that the woman was uncomfortable with the situation, with being on her side of the desk. Audra suspected that what the woman really wanted to do was to pull up a chair next to her and continue their conversation as equals. But there was no denying that a job-seeker and a prospective employer occupied different levels, they couldn't be equals.

"What interests you in a position that's so far away and in a place so unlike New York? I can promise you that the news people in Sweetwater expect is very different from the news people are accustomed to reading here. There are no investigations of inefficiencies, or worse, at hallowed institutions because South Dakota has precious few of them yet. Politics is in its infancy at the capitol and as for the doings of titans of industry, there are none. You'll be incorporating reprints, an account or two of the most recent legislative session, and a reminder of the upcoming social." Although there was a certain coolness to the woman's voice, her eyes, a pale green, seemed more curious than skeptical.

"I've lived in New York all my life. I'd like to see what's outside it, and as for the differences between the _Journal_ and the papers I've worked for, ma'am," Audra paused, caught by the strangeness of the word on her tongue, in this context, and the foreignness of being interviewed by a woman altogether, "I'd be responsible for the content, which will never be the case if I stay here." For another woman, "never" might be too strong. There were women who had founded and edited their own papers and magazines, and there were others who had made names for themselves as reporters, like Margaret Fuller and Jane Grey Swisshelm, not to mention Nellie Bly, but Audra knew "never" wasn't too strong in her case. She had angered the wrong men at the wrong times far too often, especially . . . .

The woman rested her elbows on the desk and steepled her fingers, and Audra wondered if she were doing it so she would quit fiddling with her spectacles. "You have no managerial experience. Even though the _Journal_ is a small paper compared to what you're used to, we've grown over the past few years. Our circulation, if measured by miles, would swallow any number of cities. You'd be responsible for everything from soliciting advertisements to writing opinions to ensuring delivery. What makes you think you're ready for a leap from writing for a paper to running one?"

Audra had expected this question, had practiced her answer when she snatched a few minutes of privacy in the bedroom she shared with her sister and her niece, but now that the woman across from her was waiting for her answer, she had nothing to say . . .

"Myka!" The call was eager, fond, even indulgent, but it was also a call that expected a response. Audra's prospective employer didn't bother to hide her smile, which was also fond and indulgent but knowing as well, as though Myka Bering understood better than the woman calling to her that a response wasn't only expected but demanded. A rush of footsteps beating an impatient rhythm on the floor outside and then the door was flung open. "Myka, you must - ." The woman's dark eyes flew to Audra. "You must finish conducting your interview. I'll talk with you afterward." There was more amusement than apology in her tone, and Audra thought that this was a woman who wouldn't find it at all uncomfortable to sit behind that desk. In fact, she suspected that Helena Wells was the one who had chosen the desk.

"I won't be long, Helena." Something flashed between the women, and Audra looked more sharply at them. So that was the way it was between them. She knew of such arrangements; sometimes they were called Boston marriages, sometimes less euphemistic, harsher things. When she had seen the advertisement for the position in the papers, the person to contact was listed as Miss Myka O. Bering, Editor and Publisher. There was nothing to suggest in those few words that she lived in a brownstone near Washington Square Park, nor that she lived there as the friend and companion of the infamous Helena Wells.

Audra might have believed that Myka Bering was little more than a paid companion hired by Mrs. Wells to keep the outside world at bay. For months there had been stories in the papers virtually every day concerning Helena Wells and her role in the death of a prominent business man named James MacPherson in Dakota Territory. The coverage had been extensive and damning, especially in the _Clarion_. While Audra had passionately wanted to report on the trial, she knew that her items on garden shows and charity teas hardly augured for her selection. Had MacPherson been murdered a couple of years later, she still likely wouldn't have been chosen, but she would have had a basis for believing she could have been considered. Not that the trial had been anywhere near as sensational as the build-up to it. Suddenly and inexplicably, little more than a week after the trial had started, the charges against Helena Wells had been dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence, and she had been set free. The decision, while it might have quieted the voices clamoring for her imprisonment, hadn't completely silenced them. There were still murmurs that the trial's inglorious end had been the result of the machinations of Henry Tremaine, Mrs. Wells's benefactor and reputed lover. Yet whatever the relationship between them had once been, in the six years since the trial had ended, Mrs. Wells had lived quietly, dividing her time between her home in South Dakota and her home in New York, accompanied publicly only by Miss Bering, and Henry Tremaine had returned to changing mistresses every six months. Some of the reporters Audra knew would nod wisely and claim that the two had already been secretly married and were just biding their time to announce it, but she had no doubt now to whom Helena Wells was married, in all but name.

As if she knew exactly what Audra had been thinking, Helena glanced at her, her look both roguish and appraising. "Henry has a very interesting proposition for us. He's asked us to dinner to discuss it."

"I'll be all ears," Myka replied dryly. As Helena swept out, her skirts rustling expensively, the dress a confection Audra calculated would cost her more than her weekly pay saved for . . . forever, Myka turned that pale green gaze on her again. "As I am to hear your answer, Miss Clarke," she reminded her, equally as dryly.

The answer Audra had rehearsed failed to assemble itself in the right order, "goals" and "great responsibilities" and other serious-minded words that spoke of her hopes and ambition a jumble in her mind. Panicking, she resorted to the simple adage that helped her to fill a blank piece of paper when a deadline was looming, begin with the beginning. "There's hardly been a day since I was ten years old that I haven't hawked newspapers, drummed up advertisers for them, written copy for them, or run them off the presses when the printers were out drinking with the reporters. And in all that time, I hardly ever had a title, let alone a desk. I was always among the first to be let go when times were tough and the last to be listened to. I know this business, and all I need is the opportunity to prove it." She had been truthful but maybe all that Miss Bering had heard were empty boasts. It didn't help that Miss Bering was steepling her fingers again, as though she were preparing herself to deliver bad news.

Audra held herself rigid in the chair. It had been something of a lark, though not nearly as light-hearted as one, when she had mailed a letter of interest, along with the names of three references who would attest to her good character and ability, to the publisher of the _Sweetwater Journal_. Her current employer, the _New York Banner_ , had once again passed her over for a promotion, awarding a man five years her junior with half her experience to the vied-for position of covering City Hall. If she were going to be buried in obscurity, why not in some hamlet in a state whose name people could barely remember, let alone spell? At least she would have the satisfaction of seeing her name above a masthead, even if the newspaper were little more than a circular.

"You've told me why you think you can manage my paper, but why do you want to manage any newspaper? Why are you still in the business? The publishers are men, the editors are men, the advertisers are men, and when they aren't telling you that the work is too physically demanding or too mentally challenging for a woman, they're showing you they think it by giving assignments to the man standing next to you – and paying you less. If it's a wage you need, there are positions that better compensate you for the indignities that you'll suffer." Miss Bering had stopped steepling her fingers to cross her arms on the desktop and to lean over them, her shoulders hunched intently, making Audra think that what she might say in response could be what secured her the post or put it out of reach.

She desperately wanted to look away because she knew she didn't have the answer Miss Bering was looking for. "Because it's all I've known" would be the wrong thing to say, although there was more than a little truth to it. "Because I'm good at what I do" would be slightly better but almost as inadequate. One expressed timidity and a lack of confidence, hardly qualities Myka Bering wanted to see in an editor, while the other, albeit more confident-sounding, didn't explain why she had gone from paper to paper, never looking for or even thinking of different work, nor why, once she had ended up at the _Banner_ , she hadn't had the gumption to leave it after being continually passed over. "I'm one of 11 children, and in our family, you had to shout to make yourself heard. Our parents didn't the time or energy to pay attention to the cares of two children or the tales they had to tell, let alone 11. Newspapers are always searching for stores to publish." She hesitated. She knew she wasn't making sense. Unconsciously leaning forward, mirroring the intensity of the woman across from her, she said, "To write those stories, you have to listen to the patrolman on his beat and the politician in his office. You do more listening than writing, at least you should, if you want to be any good. I like to listen to people and to make it possible for others to hear what they have to say."

Miss Bering smiled at her. "Thank you." Audra couldn't determine from the politeness of her smile and the unrevealing steadiness of her gaze whether she had meant it simply as an acknowledgment or had heard in that off-center response the answer she had been hoping for. Surging to her feet as Miss Bering came around her desk, her arm already extended, Audra realized she wouldn't learn anymore today about what Miss Bering might think of her because the interview was over. Unsure if it was expected of her, Audra shook Miss Bering's hand, which, much to her surprise, gripped hers strongly. The hand had looked slim, even elegant, but the skin had the hard smoothness that came from years of toil, not pampering. Despite the dress that was only moderately less expensive than Mrs. Wells's, although much plainer in style and ornamentation, Miss Bering, it seemed, hadn't lost the habit of putting herself to work. But what she would have to do in this well-staffed home, if the maid who had opened the door to Audra and the one who had brought her a cup of coffee while she had waited in the library were any indication, was a mystery to her. "I'm very close to making my decision," Miss Bering was saying to her as they returned to the foyer that alone could encompass a good portion of the second floor apartment that Audra shared with her sister Nan and her brother-in-law, their children, and a few of the younger Clarkes.

Audra remembered to offer the appropriate appreciation for Miss Bering's time and interest and Miss Bering was gracious in return, which wasn't something Audra had always encountered when seeking work. The only dissonant note was cast by Audra's coat, which was a made-over man's winter coat, one of her brother-in-law's discards, but of such a stout wool that Audra could overlook the spots where the fabric had grown thin and threadbare. The fact that it was a man's coat and of an unbecoming cut was the least of her concerns. However, the fact that she had lost another button to it was a concern, and she fretted over the likelihood that she had lost it on a piece of metal jumping down from the streetcar to make her appointment. As she shrugged it on, uncomfortably aware that Miss Bering was inspecting it, Audra almost lost Miss Bering's question in her struggle to fasten the coat as closely possible in spite of the missing buttons.

"I'm sorry, were you saying something about winter?" Audra reddened as she tugged on mittens that were more yarn loosely assembled at this point than mittens.

"I asked how well you liked winter." Again a certain coolness had crept into Miss Bering's tone, and Audra suspected that she was seeking a particular answer.

"I like the things that make winter tolerable, good fires and hot cider . . . and Christmas dinner, but in a few weeks, ma'am, it'll be spring here."

"But not there," Miss Bering countered. "There it will still be winter. You can open your door in mid-April and be greeted by three feet of snow." She let her eyes run over Audra's coat. "I suggest that you invest in a new coat." Then she smiled.

 **Chapter One**

This was the last leg of the journey, the last train. There had been the train from New York to Chicago, then from Chicago to St. Paul, Minnesota, and from St. Paul to a town hardly worthy of the name, still more settlement than town, in Audra's opinion, called Sioux Falls, just inside the state's eastern boundary (she would have to memorize how it was spelled). The trains had become smaller, older, less efficient the farther west she had traveled, the one from Sioux Falls to the state capitol, Pierre (she would have to memorize how it was pronounced), wheezing and clanking every mile, and the one she was on now, from Pierre to Sweetwater, so slow she believed she could get off and walk faster. Perhaps impatience was coloring her opinion. Today was her fourth day of being in the same undergarments, of hardly being able to brush her hair or wash her face. The only thing that had changed was her traveling companions. After a steady stream of men, salesmen by and large, who had not hesitated to grab her knees as they pretended to wobble to their seats or hawked gobs of phlegm that only sometimes didn't spatter across her shoes, she found in front of her as they left the station in Pierre, the pastor of the Lutheran church that had recently been built in Sweetwater, a Mr. Nordquist, and his wife. They had craned their necks looking for the husband or father or brother who must be accompanying her, and when no such man sat in the empty seat beside her, she had ended their confusion by explaining that she was journeying to Sweetwater to manage its newspaper. There followed tight smiles and awkward acknowledgements that they had heard Miss Bering was looking for a new editor, Mr. Simcoe having left for Kansas City. "Hard worker," Mr. Nordquist had solemnly acknowledged, "Good man," Mrs. Nordquist had said, adding, "he's left to take a position with Miss Bering's brother-in-law. He's been engaged to one of the sisters for the past two years." The beaming smile became even brighter as she said, "There's no greater blessing for a woman than a good man to support her and their children, should God so reward them."

Audra returned a smile as tight as the ones the Nordquists had bestowed upon her. "I'm sure they'll be very happy."

When Mr. Nordquist inhaled with significance and asked, "Have you thought about where you might worship the Lord Jesus while you're with us in Sweetwater?," Audra said firmly, "I was raised Catholic, Mr. Nordquist." She actually hadn't been raised in any faith, although she vaguely recalled that her mother might have been Catholic. It was the perfect answer, however, to stop further inquiries, and after a muted "The nearest Catholic church is in Halliday, I believe," from Mr. Nordquist, neither Nordquist had anything more to say to her.

It wasn't the type of response that would have earned Myka's approval, Audra ruefully admitted to herself. Just a few days before she was to take the train to Sweetwater to begin her new position - to be honest, to begin her new life, since how often would she be able to return to New York? - she had had dinner with Myka (who had insisted that she quit calling her Miss Bering since they were more partners than employer and employee) and Helena (who had followed suit, although the name felt stiff even when sounded only in Audra's mind) at their home. While much of the initial conversation had been taken up with the practicalities of managing the newspaper, it had eventually turned to the practicalities of living in Sweetwater.

"It's the isolation, the loneliness, that you may find the hardest of all to accept," Myka said.

"The ignorance," Helena interjected. Her tone growing playful, she said, "As I recall, you didn't lack for a suitor from the moment you arrived in town." The smile was playful as well but her face grew sadder as she and Myka looked at one another. "He was happy, love," she said gently, her smile not completely fading away. "A wife to bake him a pie every night, two little boys whom he adored and a third child on the way, our sheriff was a contented man." Directing her attention to Audra as Myka began to rub the design etched into the stem of her wine glass, Helena explained, "In a town as small as Sweetwater, you come to know everyone who lives in it. Whether you like your fellow citizens doesn't matter as much as whether you can depend on them. The closest towns are miles away, and the biggest city is the better part of a day's train ride northeast. We lost Sheriff Lattimer earlier this year when he tried to rescue two children presumed missing in a snowstorm. They hadn't returned home, and people feared they had wandered farther out into the prairie. The snow flies so thickly you can't see your hand in front of your face, and it becomes terrifyingly cold very quickly. He and a number of men went to search for them. The men returned, the children having been found taking shelter in a barn, but Sheriff Lattimer didn't. Another search party found him two days after the storm ended." Helena hesitated. "Life in Sweetwater can be brutal, Audra, when it's not merely grim. You'll have to learn to endure blistering heat, drought, grass fires, blizzards, and as unendurable they may seem at times, they're less insupportable than the narrow-mindedness of your neighbors. Are you sure you still want to run the _Journal_?"

"I could be asking the same question of you," Audra said boldly, gesturing first at the china and crystal glinting under the chandelier and then at the dining room itself. "Why still live in Sweetwater when you can live here all year round? You must believe there's something of value the town can give you, or something you can give the town. I believe that I can do something similar, better there than here."

Myka raised her eyes from her wine glass. "As I said, it can be lonely living out on the prairie. You'll find plenty of people to listen to. They can be small-minded and suspicious of strangers, but they also can be exceedingly generous. If you can find the best in them, you'll find it worth the effort." Sorrow still shadowed her face, but her gaze was clear and direct.

"She managed to find the best in a brothel-owner, and I hope she still finds it was worth the effort." Helena was teasing Myka once more, but the affection in her voice was palpable, and Audra was certain that if she hadn't been at the table with them, Helena would have leaned over to kiss her "companion."

"It will help with the isolation you might feel, especially in the winter, if you have people who want to listen to you, and not just as an editor of a newspaper. There _are_ good people in Sweetwater," Myka repeated with a stern look at Helena.

"Unless you're taking such a someone with you," Helena said innocently to Audra, ignoring the look. At Myka's equally stern "Helena," Helena said, "Darling, this is not the former brothel-owner speaking. I believe Audra has referred to having several brothers and sisters, maybe one of them will be accompanying her." The dark eyes had both a feline tilt and a feline shine, reflecting rather than absorbing the electric light of the chandelier.

Audra knew exactly what Helena had meant, and she shook her head. "No, no family, no intended. I'll be arriving in Sweetwater unaccompanied."

She had said it lightly, but as she met Helena's gaze, she felt that she was being measured and appraised, much as she had felt measured and appraised when Helena had interrupted her interview, little more than a week ago. The inventory was impersonal without being cold and thorough without being intrusive. Audra suddenly had an image of Helena as a brothel-owner judging how profitable a new girl could be. "I doubt very much that you'll be leaving Sweetwater unaccompanied, should there come such a time," Helena said with a hint of smugness.

Remembering that appraisal now, Audra looked down at her stained and spotted dress and touched what she was sure were matted curls. She hadn't understood what Helena had found in her to make such an assertion - out of six sisters, she had never ever been called the "pretty one" - and she doubted that her appearance was any more pleasing after several days of travel. Frank had called her pretty once or twice, but that was only before she had given in to his entreaties and . . . . Audra blushed in recollection and decided that she had spent enough time thinking about that part of the dinner conversation. She didn't know how long she might stay in Sweetwater. If all went well, she might consider applying for a similar position at a larger newspaper someday, maybe even a paper in New York, but she didn't expect that she would be bringing anyone back with her. She would leave as she came, an independent woman.

Leaning forward, she tried to peer through the soot-covered window that she and the Nordquists shared. She had caught glimpses of the terrain they were crossing, rolling and cultivated around Lake Erie and then increasingly flat as they had traveled through Indiana and Illinois, the flatness and barrenness interrupted only by the sprawl of Chicago and bluffs that bordered the Mississippi. Occasionally the sweep of a river might break the monotony, but otherwise all she saw was grass and sky. The prairie seemed, might even be, unending, but it wasn't empty; sometimes she could make out a farmhouse or barn against the horizon, which supported her belief that somewhere out there were farmers readying the land for planting, but the closest thing to a human she had glimpsed was a cow. The vastness, the emptiness of this country questioned, if not ridiculed, a person's pride in her independence; she was so very small in comparison. It was difficult to have confidence in that independence, moreover, when for the next several weeks, months possibly, she would have no one to turn to for advice about the _Journal's_ operations, should she need it. Over dinner, Myka had explained that while it had been her plan to follow Audra a few days later to help ease her into her new responsibilities, a journey that would be one with her and Helena's usual springtime relocation from New York to Sweetwater, new developments had forced a change. Her excitement undisguised, she revealed that the _Clarion_ had become their newest acquisition. Audra wouldn't have guessed Myka Bering was capable of smiling that broadly.

"Having spent the past six years methodically engineering Oskar Rasmussen's financial ruin, Henry Tremaine obtained the _Clarion_ , along with other of Mr. Rasmussen's assets, for pennies on the dollar," Helena cut in with an enjoyment that didn't lack for malice. "Mr. Tremaine has no interest in running a newspaper, so he offered it to us at a very advantageous price." She sent Myka an arch look whose full meaning, Audra realized, only Myka could share.

At the time, the prospect of learning how to run the paper on her own hadn't seemed daunting. Myka would be available by telegram if any emergency arose, and Hans, Audra searched her memory for his name, Hans Albrecht would be someone who could help her if there were problems with the printing press. But now, now it all seemed too big. Under the _Journal_ 's umbrella, there were the Halliday _Free Press_ and the Meridian _Pioneer News_. Although the two had yet to be formally merged, Helena and Myka had acquired last summer the Pierre _Guardian_. Thankfully, she wasn't expected to make frequent trips to Pierre since the _Guardian_ 's editor had decided to stay on following the acquisition, but she would need to visit Halliday and Meridian. The _Journal_ included news and advertisements of special interest to each community and though she could reach each of them by rail, or so Myka had assured her, she would spend the better part of a day getting to Halliday, and Meridian was another day's journey east of Halliday. She hadn't realized until the train leaving Sioux Falls had traveled some distance west and the prairie extended to the horizon and beyond on either side of her, just what an undertaking it would be. For a moment, she felt sick from the enormity of it, the prairie, the sky overhanging it. In the city, the sky had a quilted, patchwork quality, cut up into irregular squares by the buildings that rose stories high, but here, here, it was as if the Atlantic Ocean had been inverted and placed above her, and Audra thought she could as easily drown in space as she could water.

Begin with the beginning, she reminded herself, and the first thing she would do when she arrived in Sweetwater was what Myka had advised her to do, find Hans Albrecht and get the keys to the _Journal_ 's office from him. In addition to keeping the _Journal_ 's press in good repair, he fixed ranges and sewing machines, cash registers and farm machinery. Myka had said she might happen upon him on his way to inspect a balky stove or tune a piano, but she would have better luck finding him if she spoke to his sister, Mrs. Lattimer. By the time the train arrived in Sweetwater, it was supper time or perilously close to it, which, Audra felt, only vindicated her decision to speak with Mrs. Lattimer before doing anything else on her list of "first day" tasks, drawn up only in her mind and pages long. No man Audra knew, even the topers among them, willingly missed a meal; cards and drink could wait. Hans Albrecht was likely hanging over his sister's shoulder at this very minute, asking her when supper would be ready. Audra's desire to see the house that would be hers for as long as she remained the _Journal_ 's editor was a secondary consideration, despite the fact that she continued to marvel at the prospect of occupying a house, having only ever lived in cramped apartments in which privacy was as rare as fresh air. Above all, she wanted to visit the _Journal's_ office, to poke in its corners and open its desk drawers, hoping to get an idea of how she would need to adapt to it and it to her. No paper was perfect, no matter how large its circulation or how advanced its production. There were always processes that could be improved and machinery that could be replaced.

As the train lurched to a stop, Audra, who had long since retrieved her valise (her sole piece of luggage) from underneath her seat, shot to her feet in hopes of exiting the car as soon as the conductor opened the door. She hastily offered farewells to the Nordquists who were more sedately collecting their things, and they murmured wishes that they might see more of each other in the future. More warmly, Mr. Nordquist said, "Jesus doesn't place the importance that we do on the forms of our faith. He wouldn't care that you might choose some Sunday to attend our house of worship." Audra only smiled in response and edged around her seat, ready to join the other passengers in the corridor as they pressed toward the exit. "Miss Clarke, I believe you've forgotten something."

She whirled around to see that Mr. Nordquist was holding her coat out to her. Her new coat. One heavy enough to withstand the winters at the North Pole, the clerk had assured her, yet appropriately feminine. It had been too warm to wear on the train, but as Audra reached to take it from him, she glimpsed snow on the station platform. Not a patch of it here or there as you could still find in New York in early April but a thick covering, like a carpet. Mr. Nordquist unsuccessfully smothered a smile at the shock on her face. "Not what you're used to, is it?" He held the coat up for her to slip her arms into it. "You'll need this out there." She reluctantly put her valise on the floor and allowed him to help her put it on, Mrs. Nordquist providing commentary on the order of "Lovely coat, but just a mite thin for the worst of the winter here" and "Well made, but it should fasten farther up to block out the icy winds we get." The coat was made of wool but felt like it was made of chain mail. She could easily believe it weighed 20 pounds as she stooped to pick up her valise, which was overstuffed and equally heavy. She plodded toward the exit, as bent and slow as a pack mule.

Laboring down onto the platform, she noticed how low the sun was on the horizon, and she fretted that it would be night before she was able to enter the _Journal_ 's office. Trying to increase her pace, she nearly swung her valise into the stationmaster, who admonished her, "Miss, you need to keep an eye out for where you're going. Lots of people coming off the train." By New York standards, the platform was virtually deserted, a dozen or so passengers waiting for their baggage and about as many walking past the station house on their way into the town proper. With a muttered apology, she followed the ones leaving, realizing as she tramped through the snow and puddles of water that the shoes she was wearing (her only pair, in fact) weren't sufficient either. The leather was dark with moisture, and she could feel water seep through the seams. She stopped on the edge of the main street, wide and lined with the businesses that were the lifeblood of any small town - general store, hotel, bank, barbershop, and farther down, a saloon and livery. As she twitched her damp toes in recognition that her preparations for the journey had managed to fall short, Audra also remembered that she hadn't thought to ask Myka where Mrs. Lattimer lived. It hadn't seemed important at the time considering everything else she needed to do. How difficult could it be to find someone, anyone in a tiny prairie town? Yet the sun was setting on a town that was bigger than Audra was anticipating. Sweetwater was no longer a community stretching away erratically - and sparsely - from a single road, as Myka had described its appearance, reminiscing during the dinner about her first impressions of the town. The winding paths between the homes had been widened and groomed into streets deserving of the name. Had she arrived earlier she would have used her ignorance as an opportunity to acquaint herself with the town, but she would worry about introducing herself to Sweetwater tomorrow. Today, or what was left of today, she would start her inventory of the _Journal_ and then, if she was too tired, she would simply use her valise as a pillow and sleep on the floor.

A man passing her on the warped slats that passed for a sidewalk had slowed to appraise the arrival of someone obviously new in town. He tipped his hat in greeting and gave her his friendliest smile. "You look a little lost, miss. Maybe I can be of assistance?"

He wasn't leering at her, but there was something too confident in his smile, as though he believed he had routinely succeeded in charming all the unaccompanied women who visited Sweetwater. Brusquely Audra told him, "I'm looking for where Mrs. Lattimer lives."

"If you're wanting to find the sheriff's widow, you just need to follow the street down from the jail. Here, let me take your bag, and I'll show you." He held his hand out for her valise.

Sheriff's widow. Audra remembered the stricken look on Myka's face, the story of the children lost in a snowstorm. Two little boys and a third child on the way, Helena had said. Nothing like barging into a grieving woman's household and asking for her help in locating her brother. "Thank you very much for the information, but I can find it on my own now." She injected as much coolness as she dared into her response and started to cross the street without waiting for his reply, spotting a squat brick building that had a deserted air about it. A sheriff in a town this size wouldn't have much to do until the weekend, when the young men from the farms and ranches came riding in looking for entertainment. Behind her, she heard the man stammering in surprise but she kept walking.

Nearing the building, she spied the Wanted posters posted on the walls, but the interior was dark. Perhaps the town hadn't found a sheriff to replace Mr. Lattimer, perhaps hadn't needed to with winter keeping people in their homes, but spring was here, according to the calendar, and there needed to be someone with authority, or at least one sporting a star, to keep all that pent-up energy contained. There was a street to the left of the main street that led beyond the jail and there were homes on either side of it. The Lattimer residence would be among them. Picking her way over to a thin strip of exposed grass that promised surer footing than the snow-churned mud in the middle, Audra noted that the jail and the saloon were practically across the street from one another. She doubted that the jail acted as much of a deterrent to the men who congregated at the saloon, but the sheriff wouldn't have to walk far to break up a fight or put a troublemaker in a cell. The valise was getting heavier with every step; a handful of books, her few dresses and undergarments, her brush, a photograph of Nan and her husband on their wedding day (Audra had to have some reminder of home), how could they weigh so much? Her foot skidded, and she understood her purchase was no more certain on the grass than if she had slogged through the icy mud.

The houses in the fading light looked nearly identical, one story, two- or three-room homes, the main distinction being in their age, the older houses weathered to gray, their paint, if they had been painted, clinging to the wood only in spots, the newer ones, and there were several of them, still having a greenish tinge as if their sides might suddenly sprout leaves. Which one, which one, Audra silently chanted, the arm carrying the valise hanging so low that its bottom barely cleared the ground. Then a house farther down the street from the others caught her eye, and she no longer had to ask herself which one. It was larger than the others and its paint was fresh, but that wasn't what told her it was the sheriff's house. Though its yard was the same sloppy mixture of snow and mud, the house seemed to sit in it more neatly, and the front porch - it was one of the few that had one - appeared to be swept clean. Even the smoke issuing from the chimney curled decorously, circumspectly into the air. The house of a sheriff couldn't appear to be less than in perfect order, and her picture of intruding upon a household in mourning became a double intrusion because she would be introducing her damp, disarrayed self - in wet, muddy shoes, no less - into an impeccably kept home. Her chances of making a favorable impression upon Mrs. Lattimer were fast diminishing.

Audra switched her valise to her other hand and straightened her shoulders. Her hair might be a tangled mess and her coat, skirts, and shoes splattered with mud, but she didn't have to look like an old woman rooting for stray pieces of coal. She could keep her chin up and back straight. With greater determination she made her way to the Lattimer house and climbed the front porch to knock on the door. The porch was as clean as it had looked, except for a few muddy paw prints. In the summer, the sheriff and his wife would have sat on this porch and looked out on the prairie, although Audra could see signs that additional houses were going to be built out this way; stakes, cloth tied around their ends and fluttering in the breeze, marked out the plots, and by the end of summer, if not sooner, Mrs. Lattimer's view would be of her new neighbors. Audra raised her hand to knock on the door, reminding herself to smile. She had been told by more than one person that her smile was among her best features, so she needed to put what few natural advantages she had to work for her.

She was never able to put the events in order afterward, whether she had knocked first and then the door had flown open or if the door had flown open while her hand was still in the air. Maybe she had already been teetering back in surprise when a body with four legs followed by a body with two legs had barreled into her. Her arms swung away from her sides at the force of the collision and the valise, a cannonball in weight by this time, spun her around. She might have been able to regain her balance had the dog and the boy not also recovered and resumed their chase. They didn't collide with her again, but as they bowled past her, she was still unsteady enough that their inadvertent brushing against her sent her off the porch into the mud. She desperately tried to avoid falling, but the valise, the damn valise, was too much for her once more and her back smacked noisily into the muck. The door was flung open again, and a woman rushed out onto the porch, shouting "Will! William Lattimer, come back here!" Turning around, she yelled back into the house, "Mary, get the next batch of rolls into the oven. We'll worry about the ones that are on the floor later." Only then did she see Audra in the mud. "Oh, no, I'm so sorry. I didn't see you, and, clearly, my son didn't see you." Muttering in a language that wasn't English - Audra didn't have to understand the words to know that Mrs. Lattimer was asking what else could go wrong with her day - the woman carefully, awkward stepped down from the porch to help Audra to her feet.

Audra had been scrabbling to push herself up, dismally accepting that her brand-new - and expensive - coat was never going to quite recover from its first outing. Her stockings, shoes, and the skirt of her dress were also stained beyond her ability to get them clean but she didn't feel their loss as keenly. The shoes were old, the stockings new but cheap, and the dress secondhand. Mrs. Lattimer was extending her hand to her, and although Audra was embarrassed to be helped to her feet by a pregnant woman, and one well along in her pregnancy at that, her shoes were now so thoroughly wet and covered with mud, she didn't trust that she could stand up without help. Mrs. Lattimer's grip was sure and she pulled Audra up without risking her own balance, although the disposition of the weight she was having to support, the child she was carrying in addition to that of a grown woman, was working against her. Standing so close to her, Audra realized that they were practically of a height, which was a novel sensation, the Clarke family joke being that she was a changeling, tall and thin and cursed with hair both wiry and red, while the rest of the Clarkes were dark-haired and on the small side.

It had been a joke only when her father and older brothers weren't in their cups; after a night spent at McGiverney's tavern or sharing homemade spirits on the stoop with the other tenants, her father and brothers would give her increasingly hostile looks and the references to her being a changeling would grow darker, her father muttering that about the time Audra's mother had become pregnant with her he had been "laid up," as he put it. If she hadn't resembled him so strongly, aside from her height and the color of her hair, and if her mother hadn't already been worn to silent compliance by the five children who preceded her, Audra might have given some credence to his suspicions. But Timothy Clarke hadn't been a man who had wanted the cares of a single child, let alone 11 of them, so she had learned early on to dismiss his broad hints that she wasn't his as his hopes that he could shirk the responsibility of having fathered at least one of his children. But Mrs. Lattimer had no way of knowing, and wouldn't likely care had she known, that not towering over another woman was something that Audra found not only novel but pleasant as well.

Blue eyes on a level with Audra's own searched her face for any sign that her tumble off the porch had injured more than her pride, and Audra shook her head slightly in negation. "Come inside, and we'll try to clean you up." Mrs. Lattimer stepped to the side, encouraging Audra to go ahead of her. Audra shook her head more strongly, retrieving her valise, which only reluctantly came free of the mud.

"I'll bring a mess into your home. I can clean myself up on your porch, if you don't mind my getting it muddy."

"Come inside," Mrs. Lattimer insisted, her tone firmer. In a sweeping motion, she gestured down the length of her, and Audra understood that she was to take the apron dotted with streaks of batter and the smudges of flour on Mrs. Lattimer's face as proof that she was in no better order. However, while the apron and Mrs. Lattimer's cheeks and forehead bore witness to a lengthy session of baking, the blond hair skillfully braided and then as skillfully pinned up and the sober navy dress, protected by the apron, still neat and with a collar still crisp suggested that her disorder was strictly temporary.

This realization only reinforced the first thought that had entered Audra's mind when Mrs. Lattimer had bent low over her belly to offer her hand, that this sheriff's widow in this unremarkable town in this unremarkable place was remarkably beautiful, so much so that Audra was fairly well convinced she had said aloud the words that had immediately come to mind, "You're perfect."


	2. Chapter 2

She hadn't said it. Audra was pretty sure she hadn't, or perhaps Mrs. Lattimer, guiding her with sureness and efficiency into the house, dripping valise and all, was so accustomed to hearing such spontaneous compliments that she took no notice of it. The embarrassment attending her impulsive observation (if so something so gushing could merit the description) receded only to be replaced by her embarrassment at standing soggy and muddy on the rug just inside the door. The rug was the small, possibly only, demarcation between the entrance and the living area (what she would have called a parlor if it had been more formally set off), in which a sofa, a knitted blanket over its back and a book splayed on its cushion indicating where Mrs. Lattimer sat of an evening, an armchair, and a rocker comprised its furnishings. In front of the sofa was a carpet on which a little boy in a winter gown stopped playing with wooden blocks to point at Audra and ask his mother, "Who zat, Mama?"

He had a shock of blond hair so silvery in the late afternoon light that it looked white. His eyes were large and brown, and though his features had a baby's softness, Audra could tell that they were already blunter and thicker than his mother's. He took after his father, she supposed. "This is Miss Clarke," his mother said encouragingly. As Audra turned her head to look at Mrs. Lattimer in surprise, Mrs. Lattimer said, "Can you say 'Hello,' Gus?"

He stopped pointing and put the finger in his mouth. "'Lo,'" he said around it. His interest in Audra temporarily exhausted, he returned to stacking his blocks.

"How do you -." Audra's question was cut off by Mrs. Lattimer's quiet "Let's get that coat off you and see what we can do to clean it."

Instinctively Audra crossed her arms. "No, it'll make a mess on your floor. I came to talk to your brother about the _Journal_ 's office. I'll just go there now and talk to him later."

"Later will be tomorrow at the earliest." Mrs. Lattimer's brows pulled in over a nose that didn't jostle for space or, conversely, crowd its neighbors to the side. It lived in harmony with the rest of her features, which Audra felt she couldn't say about her own. She thought she could see a small bump in its bridge, which was a welcome imperfection. "Before you make any decisions about what you have to do, can I persuade you to rest for a little while?" Mrs. Lattimer smiled in invitation. "Will you have supper with us?"

Audra's eyes skipped over Gus to take in the kitchen that the living area led into, the transition marked by a table and four chairs, the centerpiece a vase filled with dried flowers. The kitchen was dominated by a large range at which Mary, whose rounded shoulders hunched nearly to her ears spoke to her shyness, rearranged rolls on a baking sheet. Evidence of the collision that had spilled onto the porch was still visible, patches of flour on the floor marked by paw prints. "I've interrupted your baking."

"The baking always stops for supper," Mrs. Lattimer said, adding wryly, "unless it is supper." The blue eyes so surprisingly on a level with Audra's own offered an extra entreaty. "Please? I feel that it's the least I can do." As Audra hesitated, Mrs. Lattimer said, "Your coat can dry during supper. Afterwards we'll brush it to rid it of the dirt and then, if you're insistent about going to the _Journal_ 's office, I'll take you there. It's all very practical."

Audra detected something teasing in Mrs. Lattimer's smile, as if she had divined how best to persuade her to join them for supper. But Audra couldn't deny that the proposal did sound practical, and she was hungry, and standing on the rug wasn't accomplishing anything at all. She was about to comply with Mrs. Lattimer's instructions when someone on the other side of the door began to push it against her back and the heels of her boots. There followed yelping and whining as a dog scratched to be let in and as a boy shouted through the gap, "I'm back. Open the door." Audra moved farther into the room, conscious that she was now dripping mud and snowmelt on the floor as Mrs. Lattimer opened the door and her oldest son rushed in. She awkwardly made a grab for the dog, but her belly was in the way. The dog danced out of her grasp and then shook himself in front of the sofa and sent a spray of water droplets everywhere, including Gus, who puckered his mouth and started to cry only to stop after a second or two and resume playing with his blocks as though nothing had happened.

"Bruno," Will scolded, his boots squelching as he went to the dog and tried to pull him away from the furniture by the scruff of his neck. Bruno dug his claws into the floor, thinking another game was about to begin.

Mrs. Lattimer closed her eyes, and Audra could see her lips moving, as if she were counting to herself. "Will, take off your boots," she said in a voice roughened with exasperation, her accent sounding stronger. "Mary, please take Miss Clarke into my bedroom and help her find something warm and dry." She bent the full force of her glare on the dog. "Bruno -"

"Stop being a dog," Audra couldn't resist cutting in.

As Mrs. Lattimer's eyes came to rest on her, Audra regretted the impulsive joke. Nan always told her she was too sassy for her own good, and it was clear that Mrs. Lattimer hadn't appreciated the interruption, her mouth still tensed in anger and her glare undiminished. She had been in Sweetwater not even an hour, and she had already managed to anger someone whose help she needed. When would she learn to let her brain lead her mouth and not the other way around? There was a small thump of something soft hitting the floor, and Will giggled as Bruno sat back on his haunches, looking up at Audra as if he were waiting for her next command.

Will's giggles were joined by a burst of laughter, more weary than merry, but as Audra risked a glance at her, she saw that Mrs. Lattimer's glare had gentled into a look that was resigned and amused both. "Tell me, does that work on children?"

Suppertime in the Lattimer household wasn't unlike suppertime in the Pawlik household - that is, when Audra remembered supper and wasn't staying late at the _Banner_ 's office trying to complete a story or out on the streets hunting a new one. Her nieces and nephews would be alternately fighting and eating, stabbing with their forks the brother or sister sitting next to them as they chewed the overcooked meat Nan had served them. Their father would be bent over his plate working his knife and spoon with admirable dexterity, each separating, lifting, and delivering into his open mouth mounds of mashed-together meat and potatoes without ever once colliding. His dexterity was all the more remarkable in that he could pause between bites to shout at any one of his children that "I'll tan your hide if you don't behave" while the knife and spoon continued their work without interruption or accident. Nan and Alice and Hettie would be frowning at the lumps in the gravy or complaining about the quality of the meat, or, if they were less out of sorts with the children, promising them that they would work on mending the oldest girl's favorite dress or letting out the hems of Bob's trousers for the younger but taller Dicky. Mrs. Lattimer's children were fewer in number and better behaved, but Will repeatedly asked his mother if he could play outside with the other boys after supper, modifying and resubmitting his request each time his mother told him no. ("If I stay in the yard?" "If I come in when it's dark?") while Gus sang to himself and banged his spoon on his plate in accompaniment. Mrs. Lattimer had no time to comment on the meal, providing a steady stream of no's to her oldest son while she attempted to still her youngest's drumming. To add to the cacophony, Bruno steadily howled from the porch where he had been banished while they ate supper.

"You never let me have any fun," Will grumbled, doggedly pursuing a slice of carrot across his plate.

"I don't allow you to do as you please," his mother countered. "You're going to help me clean up the kitchen and then we'll work on your letters."

Audra silently agreed that Will had a point about the appeal of chores and school work, although he looked too young to be attending school. His face stubbornly set, his features mirrored his mother's in their mutual discontent. Their eyebrows were deeply veed over their noses, one set a dark blond, the other brown, and their lips quivered minutely at their corners as they remained in unyielding lines. Will's eyes were a similar startling blue, but they lacked his mother's friendliness whenever he looked at Audra. They displayed a wariness that had he been Gus's age would have sent him into hiding behind his mother's skirt.

"Would you like more?" Mrs. Lattimer was looking at her empty plate, Audra realized.

She shook her head, but it wasn't very convincing as Mrs. Lattimer rose and carried the plate over to the stove. Audra hadn't eaten a real meal since the night before, having only nibbled on a package of stale crackers that she had bought midday when the train had stopped at a town halfway between Pierre and Sweetwater. But it wasn't just hunger that had made her clean her plate. The differences between the Pawlik and Lattimer households weren't limited to the size of the table and the number of people sitting around it. Nan's cooking had never tasted this good. Even though Mrs. Lattimer had seemed embarrassed earlier when she had been ladling a stew so thick with dumplings and vegetables - with bits of bacon scattered throughout - that it could be served on a plate, explaining that tonight would see the end of it and apologizing for the fact that it had more dumplings than meat, Audra thought she could live on the dumplings alone. They might be sodden to the point of dissolving but even at this late stage they were better than the dumplings that Nan made, so small and tough that you would swear they could bounce if they hit the floor.

All in all, her first day in Sweetwater had turned out better than she had expected it would when she had been flat on her back in the swampy Lattimer yard and staring up at the sky. Her coat and the dress she had worn earlier were drying by the stove in the parlor area, the girl Mary having taken them and draped them over a couple of kitchen chairs before she left for the day. Since the valise hadn't absorbed as much water as she had feared, Audra had been able to change into one of her other dresses. Which was just as well, while a dress borrowed from Mrs. Lattimer might have been long enough it would have been too roomy in the bodice. But now that she had had a chance to sit down and stretch her legs and eat a decent meal, she was anxious to see what she could of the _Journal_ 's office and then make a bed for herself in the editor's house, _her_ house. Audra didn't care if it was dark and cold and overrun by mice, she would be willing to endure all those things and more, if she could endure them alone. She could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had had a bed to herself. There had always been so many Clarkes, and then so many Pawliks when she and her two younger sisters had gone to live with Nan, that it had been virtually impossible to distinguish between the voice her thoughts assumed inside her head and the voices of her sisters and nieces. She would help Mrs. Lattimer clean up after dinner and then she would get on her way. Mrs. Lattimer didn't need to accompany her. How could she possibly get lost?

As they scraped off the dishes, the leftovers being deposited into Bruno's food bowl, Mrs. Lattimer expressed her doubts about the wisdom of staying overnight in the house. "It's not that the house isn't clean or that mice and squirrels have made nests in the furniture." Taking a pail with her, Mrs. Lattimer opened the kitchen door and walked out into the yard. In the deepening twilight, Audra saw a pump and, closer to end of the property, the narrow shed-like structure that had to be the outhouse. Audra heard the gush of water hitting metal as Mrs. Lattimer worked the pump to fill the pail. "It's been aired and swept, and I've put dust covers on the furniture," she said raising her voice above the sound of the water, "but it's still winter here, no matter that it's April. The boiler will need to be filled before you can hope for any heat." As she carried the pail into the kitchen, Audra reached to take it from her and poured the water into the sink.

As poor a place as Nan and Jim's apartment was, at least it had running water and, though all the tenants on the floor had to share it, the toilet was inside. Audra realized she hadn't just crossed half the country, she had crossed centuries - in the wrong direction. Grabbing the dish towel that had been hung over one of the knobs on the stove, she began to dry the dishes that Mrs. Lattimer was washing. "I don't mind being a little cold, as long as I don't end up freezing . . . ." Her voice trailed off and she nearly the dropped the plate she was drying as dismay coursed through her. She had offered awkward condolences earlier, and Mrs. Lattimer had quietly accepted them, her expression stiffening as though being reminded of her loss was becoming almost as burdensome as enduring it. But that wasn't quite right or quite fair, Audra had decided, because, in the next instant, Mrs. Lattimer's face had relaxed and the distance in her eyes had vanished. Perhaps she had simply caught Mrs. Lattimer by surprise. Like now, except that now was so much worse because she had made a joke of it, which wasn't what she had intended to do at all. "Intentions don't count," she could hear Nan scolding her. "People don't hear what you _meant_ to say."

She mechanically continued to wipe the plate, trying to imagine what she could possibly offer as an apology, but Mrs. Lattimer was saying as matter of factly as someone might who hadn't lost her husband to a Dakota winter, "You won't freeze, but you'll be very -"

"I'm sorry," Audra interrupted. "I'm so sorry. I don't know what I was thinking, I wasn't thinking -." She felt Mrs. Lattimer's hands on her shoulders and thought she could feel the blue of those eyes burn through her.

"There's nothing to apologize for. Life out here can be hard." She paused and then amended, "Life out here _is_ hard. If we avoided talking about all the things that remind us of the ones we've lost, we'd have nothing to say to each other." Audra risked a glance away from the plate. My husband," again Mrs. Lattimer's face stilled and then just as quickly her expression lightened with a smile. "My husband," she repeated more confidently, "would be the first to make a joke about freezing. He didn't take many things seriously, least of all himself."

Had Audra held to her original plan, by the time Mrs. Lattimer would have been ready to take her to the _Journal_ 's office, which was after the dishes were cleaned, the dog fed, and Gus changed and put into a clean gown, the four of them would have been picking their way through the icy ruts of the street by the wavering light of a lantern. No, Gus was too small to be walking on treacherous ground, Mrs. Lattimer would be carrying him, and she seemed the type of woman who would insist on holding the lantern as well. Audra stifled a yawn as she sank deeper into the sofa and inched her fingers toward the book splayed on the cushion at the far end. It could all wait a few more hours, couldn't it? The newspaper, her new start, her chance to make her mark - her house and the precious solitude it offered - all important, yes, but not as inviting, if she were to be honest, as this sofa, the slice of date bread that Mrs. Lattimer had promised, and _The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective_.

Gus was toddling toward her, arms out, and instinctively Audra lifted him onto the sofa. After a glance at the dining table at which his mother was guiding Will through the writing of the alphabet, he crawled closer to Audra and then pushed himself to a sitting position next to her, looking alertly at the book she held. Like every mother Audra had known, Mrs. Lattimer had the godlike power of seeing the potential trouble her children were stirring up, regardless of whether they were in her field of vision. "He loves to be read to. Pete would read to him from the cowboy stories he would buy. When I've nothing else, I'll read to him from the _Journal_."

"Does it put him to sleep?" Audra asked wryly.

"Hans has been printing it since Mr. Simcoe left, so it's full of news from elsewhere. Gus is very well informed about the goings-on in Washington D.C."

"Is he a Democrat or Republican?"

Mrs. Lattimer grinned at her over Will's bent head. "He's for whatever party promises him more at election time." As Will handed her his slate for inspection, she evaluated his efforts. "That's a very good 'C.' All you have to do is remember that it's shaped like the handle of a cup."

"C for cup," Will repeated.

"Or Clarke," Audra added. "But there's no symbol to associate with Clarke, I guess." Unless you used a child's rattle or cradle as a symbol. "C" stood for children, too, producing them being one of the very few things at which her father had been successful.

Mrs. Lattimer seemed to be puzzling over what she could suggest Clarke stood for, but Audra could now think of several, most of them having to do with her father and most of them negative: cash-strapped, choleric, craven -

"C for 'copy' or 'clipping.' In place of Clarke, you could have an image of a clipped article or advertisement," Mrs. Lattimer said triumphantly.

"I like 'cup,'" Will maintained, directing a scowl at Audra. "'Clarke' is too long to write."

"Is that so?" His mother ruffled his hair. "How will you ever make your way through all the letters that spell Lattimer?"

Stumped by the question, he rubbed vigorously at his slate and asked plaintively if lessons were done for the evening. Mrs. Lattimer nodded, and he eagerly pushed his chair back and ran to the counter from which the loaf of date bread had apparently been tantalizing him. Bruno, who had been resting on Will's feet under the table, scampered after him, whining in expectation. Audra wasn't all that familiar with dogs, but she didn't think they were overfond of sweets. However, Bruno was such an odd mix of breeds, his coat neither flat nor curly but somewhere in between, his ears long and floppy like a hound's but his muzzle narrow and delicate like a poodle's, that she wouldn't be surprised if he begged for dessert.

He wasn't quite one thing or another, somewhat like Mrs. Lattimer herself. There were Loveday Brooke's adventures on the sofa, but in Mrs. Lattimer's bedroom, Audra had seen _Middlemarch_ and _Pride and Prejudice_ on a nightstand. Earlier, when she had been encouraging her son to draw a small "a" as "round as an apple," she had then made him giggle by saying "as round as an _apfel_ " followed by "as round as a _pomme_."

He had dissolved into laughter, repeating "pomme, pomme, pomme," finally sobering enough to protest, " _Pomme_ 's not an apple, Mama. It's the sound a drum makes," before erupting into more giggles.

Mrs. Lattimer had teasingly rapped his head with her knuckles. "That's the sound a drum makes." As he grinned up at her, she kissed his cheek. "You're the apple of my eye."

"What does that mean? Apples grow on trees."

She had assumed a stern look and responded, "It means I want to see another 'a.'"

Will had taken her sternness as seriously as it deserved, saying cheekily, "Just one more, and then I get a sweet."

Audra had seen far less lovely women on the arms of politicians and financiers, yet Mrs. Lattimer had ended up the wife of the sheriff of a small prairie town. As she watched her join her son at the counter and begin slicing the date bread, Audra wondered what had brought Mrs. Lattimer here, who she had been before she arrived in Sweetwater. After sliding a generous slice of the bread onto a plate, Mrs. Lattimer started to walk to her, exhaustion giving her walk an extra sway, and Audra was reminded of ships coming into the harbor, how they would rock as they attempted to maneuver closer to the wharves. Like them, Mrs. Lattimer was a little ballast heavy these days. Audra leapt up from the sofa, making sure that she hadn't unbalanced Gus by a quick repositioning of him, fluffing out his gown. He took the fussing in stride, a finger having made its way to his mouth. Loveday Brooke didn't fare as well, slipping to the floor, and Audra bent to pick the book up, placing it on Gus's lap. Meeting Mrs. Lattimer halfway and taking the plate from her, Audra didn't miss her quiet "Thank you for seeing that he didn't topple over." Then a teasing smile flashed across her face. "We've lost him behind the cushions for hours." She turned the smile on her youngest son, and Audra saw that he had opened the book, the finger that had been in his mouth now working to turn the pages.

"Maybe he'll become a sheriff, like his father," she suggested.

"Or maybe he'll want to become a lady detective," Mrs. Lattimer said mischievously.

Audra laughed, her attention diverted from the date bread by the even greater appeal of a sense of humor lurking behind all that beauty. She thought that Mrs. Lattimer was becoming an interesting story herself. While she didn't question the frankness and the clarity of Mrs. Lattimer's gaze, she wouldn't make the mistake of dismissing her as a country widow or mother. The open looks and warm smiles could be another language she didn't yet know, like the one Mrs. Lattimer muttered in when she was angry or the one she used to tease her son.

The smell of fresh bread and the back and forth of women talking, their voices self-consciously hushed, were what woke Audra up the next morning. Not the sunlight streaking the walls or the birds chittering, at an impolitely loud volume, outside the window. It was late, past seven, according to the old pocket watch she stretched to retrieve from the crude child-size dresser. Family legend had it that the watch was her great-grandfather's watch, the Clarke who had first arrived in the United States, although he didn't go by Clarke then but by something longer and much harder to pronounce; family legend also had it that he had changed his name to Clarke after seeing the name over a shop, believing that a simple, declarative-sounding name, one with a decisive consonant at both ends fit a practical-minded nation that valued common sense and hard work. The watch was battered and cheap, a workingman's watch . . . and made about 50 years after her great-grandfather had first set foot in New York. It was possible that he had worn a pocket watch from the old country, whichever one it was, but Audra suspected that either her father or his father before him had pawned it for a bottle.

Thoughts of her father sprawling on the broken daybed in the apartment that had been her childhood home, complaining that his back hurt him too much to look for work spurred her to leave the bed, which wasn't broken and didn't smell like unwashed clothes and spirits but had been built small, perhaps not exactly for a child, but her feet had overlapped its end by several inches. Her dangling feet hadn't prevented her from falling asleep almost as soon as she had pulled the quilt over her shoulders, but it didn't invite her to drowse longer. She had protested at sleeping in it when Mrs. Lattimer had led her to the room, which was clearly the boys' room, from its bed to its dresser to the wallpaper patterned with ships and trains, but Mrs. Lattimer had said only, "You're not displacing them. They've been sleeping with me." She hadn't offered anything more in explanation, but Audra hadn't needed one, remembering how the youngest of her brothers and sisters had crowded into the bed with her and Alice after their mother had died. It didn't have to be loving, who or what you snuggled with to keep yourself from falling into the hole that a parent's passing had left behind, it simply had to be warm and possess a steady heartbeat.

When Audra entered the living area, she heard Mary, whose tendency to startle underscored her resemblance to a rabbit, asking, "So what will you do now that -" only to snap her mouth shut. Mrs. Lattimer turned from the stove to greet her with an easy warmth suggesting, even if it couldn't be true, that no interruption could be untimely. "Good morning, Miss Clarke. Would you like some breakfast?"

Audra was curious about what the two had been talking about (a conversation abruptly ended could suggest that a good story was behind it in her experience - she wrote for newspapers, after all), but she was more hungry than she was curious, and it would be rude, in any event, to insert herself into a conversation that she hadn't been invited to join, so she contented herself with breakfast, which wasn't very hard to do. It was simple, just oatmeal and coffee, but the oatmeal had been cooked with dates and dried apples, and the coffee didn't taste like sludge or turpentine. Drinking it was a pleasure rather than a necessity. Pans of rolls were cooling on the counter and, after serving Audra her oatmeal and coffee, Mrs. Lattimer had returned to rolling out dough with a rolling pin. Audra wasn't the only one who watched her; Will and Gus were at the table as well, Will slowly finishing a glass of milk and Gus running a spoon covered with oatmeal across his mouth and jaw. Mesmerized by the pin's rapid flattening of the dough, Audra, out of habit, used her napkin to clean Gus's face and then scooped a small mound of oatmeal from his bowl and fed it to him. While the Clarke credo had been that you succeeded or failed on your own, Audra had never believed that it should be applied to the youngest Clarkes. She had never begrudged them their portion of whatever meager offerings their father had managed to provide, nor had she felt, as had some of her siblings, that if a child couldn't learn to fend for himself at the table, he didn't deserve to eat.

Mrs. Lattimer flashed her a grateful smile without disrupting her rhythm. Audra guided Gus's hand back to his bowl, and he laboriously dug the tip of his spoon into the oatmeal. "We're still perfecting the spoon-to-cereal-to-mouth, we're not ready for a pie."

Lifting the pie dough and draping it over a pie tin, Mrs. Lattimer began to carefully pat and smooth it down. "The rolls and the pies are for the hotel. We ran yesterday's batch over this morning, and I'll drop off the rolls on our way to the _Journal_. The pies Mary and I will finish and take over later." She reached for a bowl and spooned filling into the tin. Her frown of concentration seemed deeper than what the task demanded. "The extra money comes in handy." Mary, who had been mixing more batter, looked at her but bit her lip, as though she had wanted to say something but thought better of it at the last minute. "As soon as I put this pie in the oven, I can take you to the office." She fondly observed Gus as he wedged the spoon between his lips. "Unless you think helping him finish his oatmeal is an all day job."

"I'm much better at nursing a paper than a baby."

"I'm not so sure." Mrs. Lattimer dipped a measuring cup into the flour sack and sprinkled the counter with flour. "Mary will watch the boys while we're gone." She removed the cloth covering a bowl pushed to the side and took out another ball of dough.

"I'm going with you, Mama," Will announced as his mother began rolling the pin in forceful, even strokes over the dough. As if only just remembering his distrust of Audra from the night before, he glowered at her. "I'm the man now that Daddy's gone."

Mrs. Lattimer unsuccessfully hid a smile while Audra restrained herself from giving him a mock glare in return. She had teased Dicky that way when he tried to lord it over his older sisters, puffing out her chest, putting her hands on her hips, mirroring every one of his gestures, but with Will, his voice, thin and treble, closer to birdsong than the commanding gruffness of the family's protector, she merely nodded. She hadn't gotten off to the best start with the Nordquists and she had had a few moments with Mrs. Lattimer that could have gone badly, she didn't need to alienate a little boy. After breakfast, the rolls placed in the basket and Mrs. Lattimer, her hair needlessly rebraided and repinned, her face washed, and her dress inspected for streaks and smears and ruthlessly brushed because she had looked a "mess" (although Audra wished when she looked a mess she looked like her), they left for the _Journal_. Over Mrs. Lattimer's protests, Audra had brought her valise with her, determined not to impose upon her hospitality for another night. As much as she wanted to peer into every corner of the _Journal_ 's office, they would stay only long enough for her to conduct a quick survey, then they would go to the editor's house, and she would figure out how to operate its boiler. She might not have a bed tonight, but she would have heat.

Will marched ahead of them, Bruno trotting at his side. Audra offered to take the basket Mrs. Lattimer was carrying as well, but she shook her head, picking her way with admirable balance through the churned mud of the street. It was warmer this morning, but the sun was turning the mud only more viscous. As they passed the jail, Will uncertainly gazed at it, as if he half-expected his father to come out to greet them, but Mrs. Lattimer spared no glance for it. The footing was surer on the wooden walk, but they went no faster. In fact, they walked more slowly, Mrs. Lattimer exchanging hello's and good morning's with the merchants opening their shops and using each encounter to introduce Audra as the new editor of the _Journal_. In some ways, it wasn't all that different from walking down the street on which Nan and Jim lived, the same idle conversation about the weather and the local goings-on. But if the people were fewer - Audra hadn't missed the buffeting by other passers-by and having to squeeze herself to the margins of the walk - their interest in her was keener. Even the shop owners less inclined to chat and to cadge a roll from the basket asked her questions about New York. (Is it true that the Vanderbilts live in a mansion that's a mile long? Is it true that J.P. Morgan eats off gold dinner plates? I hear that the president sends a telegram to the money men in New York asking for his orders for the day.) A number of them listed improvements they wanted to see in the _Journal_ , and Audra tried to fix in her memory the ones that she thought she might, realistically, be able to incorporate (unlike the ones offered by the saddlemaker and milliner, respectively, to "quit printing the lies coming out of Washington D.C." and "devote a page to fashion and photographs of royalty"). A few said with disapproving emphasis, "Another woman running the paper?" They then followed it with the comment, "No disrespect but running a newspaper is a man's job," the latter an explanation, Audra supposed, meant to blunt the sting of the former. She had heard so much of it, and worse, working for the _Banner_ , including from its other employees, that she didn't hesitate to offer a diplomatic-seeming smile as she said politely but with unmistakable challenge, "I plan to change your mind about that."

As they left the barbershop, the barber being among those who had been blunt about his opinion of the new editor, regretting that Jonas Simcoe had left his job to a woman, Mrs. Lattimer murmured, "Sweetwater has its share of, what do you call them, curmudgeons?"

"They also write the more lively letters to the editor." Audra gave her a mischievous grin. "If you don't have at least one crotchety old man warning that a glimpse of women's ankles will end civilization as we know it, then you don't really have a newspaper."

They crossed the street to the Sweetwater Hotel, the tallest building in Sweetwater if Mrs. Wells's house at the western edge of town wasn't counted, Mrs. Lattimer noted with dry amusement. "If the hotel decides to add a third floor, she may raise her own roof." Placing the basket on the lobby's counter, behind which was an impressive collection of hooks for room keys, most of them undisturbed, she rang the bell. "Helena won't admit it, but she likes having the tallest building." They had left Bruno outside, and Audra could hear his anxious whines as he waited for them on the walk. Will roamed the lobby, touching the chairs and investigating the spittoons, the latter activity occasioning a scowl from his mother; with a sigh, he returned to her side. There was a dismayingly loud clatter, as if pots were being banged together, and a few seconds later, the hotel's proprietor emerged from the back and hurried to the counter. His expression lightened when he saw the basket.

"Just in time, Mrs. Lattimer. All the rolls you brought this morning are gone." He lifted the cloth covering the top of the basket and greedily peered into it. "The pies I've ordered, when can I expect them?"

"In plenty of time for the noon meal," Mrs. Lattimer reassured him.

"They go fast, you know. Half the town has their dinner here because of the pies." He was a cadaverous-looking man, more undertaker, Audra thought, than hotel owner. He took a roll and thumbed it into halves, eating a half as Mrs. Lattimer introduced her. Mr. Stevens welcomed Audra to the town but seemed more interested in licking his finger and dabbing it against his vest to pick up crumbs, which he then proceeded to lick from his finger. Given how assiduously he pursued the crumbs, Audra revised her opinion, thinking that in his black suit coat, his bald head bobbing, bird-like, as he hunted for crumbs, he was more vulture than he was undertaker. "I understand the town council hired a new sheriff," he said, looking up from his vest at Mrs. Lattimer. "Due here in a couple of weeks they say, him and his family." His eyes were bright and hard with a curiosity indistinguishable from the avidity with which he ate the other half of the roll. "Not that Walt Hagen hasn't been doing his best to fill in, but a young town needs a young sheriff, don't you think?"

Mrs. Lattimer nodded, but Audra noticed how fixed her expression had become and the fairness of her skin, which made the blond and blue and pink of her all the more blond and blue and pink, was becoming too fair, too pale. "My husband always said that Deputy Hagen was happy being just a deputy. I'm sure both he and Sweetwater will be glad when the new sheriff arrives." She pointed to the basket. "Shall I take this back to the kitchen? I'll need it to bring the pies here."

With alacrity he grabbed the handle. "Allow me. I'll bring it right back." He hesitated. "When the new sheriff comes . . . are you . . . I mean . . . ." He coughed. "I'd hate to lose your business, Mrs. Lattimer. I hope I can still count on your breads and pies."

She didn't answer him, and all Audra heard were Bruno's whines and the creak and rattle of wagons from the street. Mrs. Lattimer was staring intently at the register on the counter. Will had drawn closer to his mother, as if he sensed that the mood of the silence had changed. Audra wanted to ask Mrs. Lattimer what Mr. Stevens had meant about being able to count on her breads and pies, but she folded in her lips and pressed them tight. This wasn't news for the _Journal_ , whatever it was.

"Pete wanted to wait to get married until he could buy the land and build the house he'd dreamed of. I wanted . . . I wanted to get married as soon as we could." Mrs. Lattimer was continuing to study the hotel's register. "The town council offered us the lot and gave Pete money toward building a home with the . . . the stipulation, yes, the stipulation," the unfamiliarity of the word had her stammering, "that it would remain the town's, reserved for the sheriff. It was a boon to us. It meant that we didn't have to wait, and Pete could still put money aside for his ranch. He used to joke that he would be Sweetwater's sheriff until Will grew old enough to take the job."

The hushed conversation between Mrs. Lattimer and Mary earlier in the morning made sense to Audra now, and she could finish the question that her appearance had interrupted. "Mary was asking what you were going to do once the sheriff arrived to claim his home. What are you going to do?"

Mrs. Lattimer turned away from the register. She had tilted her chin and though Audra didn't believe, even on this short acquaintance with her, that Mrs. Lattimer was an overproud woman, the stiffness and reserve that she had always met with in the women who set store in never having their dignity affronted absent in her, there was also no denying the pride in that well modeled chin. For the first time, Audra noticed its slight dimple, which was perfectly placed, of course. "I've made arrangements with a neighbor lady to rent a room from her until I can find more permanent lodgings." Her eyes slid back toward the register, and her cheeks, formerly so pale, began to painfully flush with color. In a lower voice, she said, "I can also return to the Donovan ranch. I was a maid there once, and I can be a maid there again. There will always be a place for me and my children with Claudia Donovan." She paused and then said with a coolness that announced the subject was closed, "We won't be without a home, Miss Clarke."

A room in another woman's house or at a ranch, which, even if it were close to town, wouldn't be the same as living in town. Despite the assurances that she and her children would have a place to live, Audra couldn't put out of her mind how the blood had drained from Mrs. Lattimer's face when Mr. Stevens mentioned the new sheriff's arrival. Yes, she wouldn't find herself and the boys - and Bruno - thrown into the street, but she was losing the home she had shared with her husband, in which she had given birth to their sons. Would she have the use of the "neighbor lady's" oven to bake the likes of the date bread that had she offered her the loaf, Audra could have eaten it entire? She could bake her rolls and pies at the Donovan ranch, but she could hardly walk them to the hotel. Audra set her valise down and rubbed her temples. She was taking up too much of Mrs. Lattimer's time. There were pies to finish making and meals to prepare and plans to settle regarding where she and the boys were going to stay. Audra didn't need Mrs. Lattimer to show her the _Journal_ 's office, she knew her way around a newspaper office. If Mrs. Lattimer could show her how to operate the boiler in the editor's house, that was all she needed.

At the change in plans, Mrs. Lattimer raised an eyebrow but said only, "Of course I can take you to the house if you prefer." Basket returned to her possession, she led them out of the lobby, promising Mr. Stevens that she or Mary would be back soon. Will slipped from her grasp, chasing after Bruno as the dog tracked the numerous scents hidden in the muck of the street. Mrs. Lattimer gave vent to an irritated huff but didn't call him back. They walked almost as far as the train station, Mrs. Lattimer pointing out the _Journal_ 's building as they passed, "Much bigger than the old one," before they turned down a street leading south out of town. Audra craned her head trying to capture as much as she could of what would be her true home, she felt, rather than the house in which she would do no more than fall into bed at the end of an evening. It wasn't tall, but it was long and deep. The windows had looked clean and the walk swept. Hans Albrecht was keeping things neat, at least.

They walked past scattered homes, older, weather-beaten, consisting of no more than a couple of rooms by the size of them. Women were outside some of them, washing clothes or beating rugs, and they waved at Mrs. Lattimer, who waved in return. Sometimes she stopped and chatted with them, never failing to introduce Audra as the _Journal_ 's new editor, but most seemed interested in whether a husband had accompanied her to Sweetwater, and once they learned that she had arrived alone, waiting for no husband to join her and having left behind no marriageable prospects, some assumed that her journeying to South Dakota was for no greater purpose than to meet a bachelor looking for a wife.

"A lot of farmers around here looking for wives," one woman averred. "They ain't big talkers and they're a little rough around the edges, but they'll be good providers."

Another woman, assuming that Audra's position would lead her to desire a man more polished than a farmer, suggested that Mrs. Lattimer introduce her to that "good-looking young doctor we have now." Mrs. Lattimer simply inclined her head as the woman warbled about Dr. Napier's dark hair and trim mustache. "Such clean strong hands, too," she enthused.

"Just in case you have a passion for matchmaking," Audra teasingly warned Mrs. Lattimer, "I didn't come out here to find a husband."

Mrs. Lattimer looked at her, and Audra found herself blushing under the gaze, although she couldn't have explained exactly why. It was how Helena had looked at her but different, personal in a way that Helena's assessing gaze hadn't been. "No, I don't believe you did, but if you want one, I think you'll find a husband sooner than you expect."

The only time Audra had thought she would get married was when she had been engaged, briefly, to Frank . . . . She shook her head to jumble her thoughts, shake him out of them. There was nothing out here to remind her of him, so she didn't need to be inventing reasons to think of him. They had passed the last of the houses, except for the one at the end of the street, where it petered out into prairie. It was tall, two-storied, with a front porch and a lane of crushed stone that led to a small barn. It was a farmhouse, painted white, and as they drew nearer, Audra could see that there were dark green shutters at the windows and a glider on the porch.

"We've come too far, haven't we?" She turned uncertainly to Mrs. Lattimer.

"This is your house, Miss Clarke."

Audra whirled around to stare at it, aware that her mouth had dropped open. "It can't be. It's too nice. It's too big." She realized that Mrs. Lattimer hadn't stopped walking and that Will and Bruno were already on the porch and chasing each other around the glider. Mrs. Lattimer was opening the front door and gesturing at her to come inside. "I don't understand. This is the kind of house that one of the merchants would own, one of the farmers whom the ladies think I should marry, not the editor of a country paper."

"Helena . . . Mrs. Wells didn't have it built for the _Journal_ 's editor. She had it built for Jonas Simcoe."

Audra climbed the steps of the porch. Her boots looked so old and ugly on the painted wood that she was suddenly ashamed to be wearing them. She followed Mrs. Lattimer into the house and felt her chest constrict; it was hard to breathe for a moment. A parlor on one side of her, the furniture covered with sheets. Another room, a sun room or morning room on the other side of her. Stairs to the right, and a hallway, a long, long hallway leading to the back, with more rooms on either side. Audra had seen far grander homes, but she had never once thought she would live in one as nice as this. Mrs. Lattimer was leading her down the hallway, opening the doors as they passed. A formal dining room, a study that could easily be turned into a library, another, smaller parlor, and then they entered the kitchen, which extended the width of the house. Counters, cupboards, a giant range, a kitchen table with four matching chairs, an icebox, a sink with faucets. Audra dropped her valise and walked around the room, touching the tile of the counter, the cool metal of the range.

"What could Mr. Simcoe have meant to her that she would do this for him?"

"Her freedom," Mrs. Lattimer said, her eyes dwelling lovingly on the range.

Audra remembered the accounts of the trial, its sudden end, the even more surprising withdrawal of charges. There had been rumors that Eugene Blaisdell, the U.S. attorney who had traveled to Dakota Territory to present the prosecution's case, never fully recovered from the disappointment. He had left the law, some said to pursue a career in the ministry, others to pursue the riches that had been promised him for ending the trial swiftly, if ignominiously. In any event, nothing had been heard of, or from, him since. Jonas Simcoe had never been mentioned in any of the stories that Audra had read, and yet Helena had constructed a veritable palace, or what amounted to one here on the prairie, for him. "Did he know who killed James MacPherson?"

Mrs. Lattimer smiled enigmatically. "I don't know the whole tale myself, but Hel-," she caught herself, "Mrs. Wells should be the one who tells you."

"It's a good way to pass a snowy winter night. I'll ask her for the story one day, if she's willing." One of the side walls came just far enough in to house a stairwell, and Audra opened the door and looked up the narrow set of stairs. "Bedrooms upstairs?"

"Four and a washroom." At Audra's "O" of surprise, Mrs. Lattimer shrugged. "She's something of an inventor, a mechanic, so she was determined to include every improvement that homes in the big cities have. I can't describe how everything works, but there are pipes taking water from a well into the kitchen and upstairs into the washroom as well. There are pipes into the cellar too and an even larger sink, for washing clothes. Then there are pipes taking the water out. Mr. Simcoe thought it was marvelous, but he was a little afraid of it. His sister thought it was the work of the devil. She used the pump outside to draw water." Mrs. Lattimer gestured at the walls and the ceiling. "Part of the reason that it's so big is that Mr. Simcoe brought his sister and her children with him when he moved here."

Nan and Jim's children could play in this house and never catch sight of one another. You could eat breakfast in the sun room and spend the day in the study and then go to bed at night without once venturing into the kitchen. How a cook like Mrs. Lattimer would appreciate having no interruptions . . . .

Mrs. Lattimer was saying that she would take her down into the cellar and show her how to fill and start the boiler. Thinner and farther off were the cries and yelps of Will and Bruno, playing outside. Strange, the one side of Audra's mind that wasn't furiously working on a proposal so unlike her and her self-professed desire for solitude was realizing that she wasn't the least bit cold. There were windows set in all of the kitchen's outer walls, and sunlight filled the room. It turned Mrs. Lattimer's hair the color of cornsilk, and Audra wondered if it would feel as soft.

"It's too big for me," she said firmly. "I'll never be able to keep it clean. I won't have the patience to learn to work the stove. I'll be traveling to Halliday and Meridian or working all hours putting the paper together. It's silly for one person to have all this space."

Disappointment blunted the smile on Mrs. Lattimer's face. "I'm sure it seems that way now -"

"It's too big for one person," Audra said with emphasis, "and your home, even if you were able to keep it, it's too small for three children and a part-time bakery." As Mrs. Lattimer simply looked bewildered, Audra said plainly, "I need a housekeeper, and you need some place to live that's big enough for the boys and the baby and the dog, not somebody's spare bedroom."

As she recognized what Audra was offering her, Mrs. Lattimer's expression grew bleak and she said, "I can't, no, I can't -"

"Work for me? I've never hired anyone before, so maybe I'll turn out to be a truly horrible employer, but then this is temporary, until you find something permanent to your liking. You don't have to stop baking for the hotel. The range is probably large enough that you could start baking for the town."

"You don't know me," Mrs. Lattimer protested. "For all you know, I'll run off with the silver." The tension that had clouded her face was easing, and her smile was beginning to return.

"Since I don't know where it is, I won't miss it." Audra was smiling now as well. "I may not know you, but I'm acquainted with your oatmeal and date bread, and if you're anything like them . . . ."

"I'm not as sweet," Mrs. Lattimer said.

"I'll take my chances. Sometimes a short acquaintance is long enough, don't you think?"

It might have been no more than the way the sunlight seemed to emphasize how blue Mrs. Lattimer's eyes were, but their color was more intense and Audra had the odd, but not unpleasant, expectation that a blue so incandescent could only engulf everything in its path, including her. Then Mrs. Lattimer was shaking her head, as if she were the one having thoughts that needed to be reshuffled and redistributed. "Yes," she agreed. "Sometimes it's all you need."


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: The German is from Google Translate, so I can only hope it's close to what a German speaker might say. As for the development late in the chapter, I whole-heartedly believe in the truism that the course of true love never runs smoothly. For anyone looking ahead, B &W should make an appearance in Chapter 4.**

Audra crouched and peered into the press. One of the cylinders was out of alignment, which meant it would take some force to reset it, which meant she would need to wait for Hans and the muscle he would put to the task, and, since she had no timetable for his return other than the "probably tomorrow afternoon" that he had casually delivered two days ago, also meant that this week's edition of the _Journal_ would be delayed. She sighed. The press had been more modern than she had expected and powered by a fuel more substantial than the muscle of a human arm (a relatively small engine that Hans had adapted for the purpose when Helena Wells had bought the press, used, from a paper gone bankrupt in Omaha), but it would still balk and complain like a mule in harness. (Audra hadn't had much experience with mules, in or out of harness, but her acquaintance with them - substantially furthered since her arrival in Sweetwater - hadn't given her cause to think the comparison was unfair.) While the _Banner's_ press would dwarf the _Journal's_ , just because the latter's was smaller and could be operated by one person (if she were quick and experienced and not afraid of losing a finger or a hand) didn't mean that it couldn't defy the strength of that one person, if she were a woman and if it were so inclined, which today it was.

In the six weeks since she had stepped off the train at the Sweetwater station, Audra had learned many things, but they generally all pointed up the same fact, namely, that life on the plains was vastly different from life in New York and that she was sorely ill-equipped to make the adjustment. For example, the _Banner_ had workmen to make repairs and adjustments to its press. Its editor didn't have to rely on the whims and idiosyncratic schedule of one man, Hans Albrecht, who preferred to work on almost any piece of machinery than the _Journal_ 's press, calling it with a growl, the "alte Hexe." Furthermore, if the _Banner's_ editor needed to leave the office for a business call, he could walk or call a hansom cab. He didn't have to learn to ride a horse, which she had been attempting inconsistently over the past several days. And if the _Banner's_ editor wanted to spend a precious Sunday morning reading or sleeping because he had been working late into the evening putting together a paper that most of its readers would frankly admit they used to start a fire in their stoves or to plug holes in their windows, he could. No one in the city cared where he spent his mornings. She, however, spent hours in a wooden pew as miserable as the Lattimer children next to her listening to Pastor Nordquist. Myka and Helena had tried to warn her, she had even counseled herself, that life here would be very, very different. She hadn't been prepared for how pinched, how full of deprivation it was, and she had come from mean circumstances. She walked away from the press before she kicked it, which had been her response the week before when the paper stopped automatically feeding. Her toes were still bruised. Since there was little more she could do with the _Journal_ today, she could use the letterpress, ancient but more reliable, to finish the wedding invitations for Mrs. Hendricks's daughter.

But she didn't turn toward the area in which the letterpress and the box of stationery were waiting for her. Instead Audra sat down heavily at her desk. The wind was blowing, she could see the dust eddying in the street and sifting through the office's screen door. It was only the end of May, but the townspeople were already worrying about drought. April's mud had long since dried, and rain had been scarce. Everything was being coated in a fine layer of silt, even the desktop was in need of a good brushing, and she had run a rag over it when she opened the office in the morning. Feeling both tired and dispirited, she began aimlessly drawing lines in the dust. The door opened with a squeal - she would add oiling its hinges on her never-ending list of things to do - and Audra said to the desk, "Johnny, come back later this afternoon, and I'll have something for you then." If only the 12-year-old Johnny, her printer's devil and general purpose errand boy, were strong enough to help her with the press. She sighed again.

"If I come back later this afternoon, your dinner will be cold." Liesl held up a cloth-covered basket and, on cue, Audra's stomach began to growl. The only noise to compete with it, since neither press was running, was the faint rattle of the screen in its track as an occasional gust of wind shook the door. It wasn't loud enough to drown out the gurgling of Audra's stomach. It made the same sound as Gus when he was on all fours pretending to be Bruno. Liesl didn't bother to disguise her look or smile of triumph. "At least some part of you listens to reason."

She placed the basket on the desk as Audra rose and leaned over to watch Liesl unpack it. Seeing her take out the dishes and the wrapped items - bread? rolls? slices of cake? - that had been used to limit the jostling was almost as good as eating what was in them. Almost. Liesl wasn't above using a little theater in her presentation, shaking out a napkin to cover the desk and giving Audra another one to place over her lap when she sat down again, if she sat down. Having eaten no more than a couple of biscuits at dawn as she walked to the _Journal_ 's office, Audra was half-afraid she wouldn't wait for Liesl to set everything out, using her fingers to scoop the food into her mouth.

Usually Mary delivered her noon meal, or, more rarely, Audra walked home to eat it with Liesl and the children. Mary had yet to stop looking like a panicked rabbit when she was with Audra and lacking Liesl's comforting presence. She would practically drop the dishes on the desk and then hurry away, half the time taking the basket with her, which left Audra to stack the dishes in the crook of her arm at the end of the day and hope she could get back to the house before she broke them. For a reason she felt no compelling need to define, Audra always enjoyed her dinner more when it was Liesl coming into the office with the basket. While she didn't mind eating with the boys, their general clamor plus Bruno's pleading, a mournful series of yowls from the backyard, equaled the racket of the printing press, and Liesl was too busy urging Will to eat his vegetables and keeping foreign objects from Gus's mouth to do more than ask Audra how busy she had been.

Oftentimes when Liesl delivered the meal, she would eat part of it with her, unself-consciously tearing off a portion of Audra's sandwich or eating a few bites of the piece of pie she had packed into the basket. What they talked about - the boys' latest escapades, the weather, how easily (or not) that week's edition of the _Journal_ was coming along, the increase in orders from the hotel - it wasn't anything that couldn't be interrupted for something more important, an impromptu business meeting with one of the town's merchants or an emergency request from the hotel's kitchen. So far that impromptu meeting or emergency request hadn't happened, but it would, and Audra recognized that she was already resenting the inevitability of it. She liked these moments in the office, eating a dinner finer than most meals she had eaten in her life, which, while doing no disservice to Liesl's abilities as a cook, spoke more to her own tendency to forget meals. (Something she was less inclined to do these days because it took more energy to run a paper, even a small one, than to run down a story, even a big one.) She liked listening to the rise and fall of Liesl's voice, which had a naturally relaxed quality, more in evidence when her children weren't running through the house, Bruno at their heels, or Will wasn't throwing at his brother the rolls she had left out to cool.

It seemed very long ago to Audra now that she had spent her first night in Sweetwater in the sheriff's house. Although the size and, quite frankly, the grandeur of the house that Helena Wells had built for the _Journal_ 's editor had overwhelmed her at first, that feeling had also passed quickly, due in no small part to the Lattimer family joining her. Liesl had accepted Audra's proposal of employment only to declare mere hours later that Audra should spend some time alone in the house first before she decided she wanted it overrun by two small boys and a dog. She should also give some thought, Liesl had altruistically cautioned her, to the noise and distraction of an infant; she and Dr. Napier anticipated that the baby would be born the first part of July. A crying baby would not make a punishing South Dakota summer any easier. While Audra didn't doubt the sincerity behind Liesl's urgings to give herself some time to think through the implications of her offer, Audra hadn't been sure how much of Liesl's hesitancy stemmed from her desire to put off leaving, for as long as she could, a home that held memories of happier times and how much from a reluctance to settle in a home that, like the one her husband had built for her, wouldn't be hers in the end, either. Audra didn't believe that she had greater rights to it because she was the paper's current editor; her situation could change with the arrival of a single telegram, but she could appreciate that the distinction held meaning for Liesl. Clarkes didn't own homes. They rented rooms or apartments and, in her father's case, were usually on the verge of being forcibly removed from them, until money for the rent in arrears magically appeared.

Maybe she would feel differently should she marry someday and have children. She laughed under her breath at the thought. It seemed as unlikely a possibility as her traveling to China or the North Pole (and less a subject of her fantasies), but at one time, it hadn't, when she and Frank - she shifted so clumsily and violently that she banged her knee into the underside of the desk. "You're frowning and you're bumping against furniture," Liesl observed, cutting off a sliver of the generous slice of rabbit pie she had brought as Audra's dinner and transferring it to her own plate. "Something's bothering you."

Audra rubbed her knee. She hadn't thought that bumping into furniture was a sign of her displeasure, but she did tend to charge off blindly when she was angry or upset, under the conviction that getting away from the source of her distress was sometimes the best way of managing it. She sometimes thought that taking out her anger on the furniture was preferable to storming from the room, to which her toes could attest, but either way, the furniture and the press were getting the better of their encounters. "It's nothing. An unpleasant thought crossed my mind, that's all."

She picked up her fork and marveled at how easily the tines drove into the tender crust. If this were one of Nan's pies . . . . Happily it wasn't, and while Audra still wasn't sure how well she liked rabbit, despite its becoming a staple of their diets since spring had chased the last of the winter away, she loved Liesl's pastry. She supposed that if Liesl had changed her mind about moving into the house, she would have learned to do without Liesl's cooking. She had lived for almost 29 years without it, but that, Audra confirmed with her first bite, had been a benighted existence. Since she had had only the valise to represent her worldly goods, Audra's own move into the house had happened quickly, and she had spent some of the advance Myka had given her on stocking her kitchen from the goods available at the general store, or the Sweetwater Emporium as Mr. Burns insisted upon calling it, pointing to the new sign over its doors. She had pots and pans as well as a few tin plates and bowls. She could cook, in a fashion, and she had all she needed to serve herself the simple meals that her scant talent could produce, but there must have been something helpless or woebegone about her because the next day, so early that she had barely finished dressing, there was Liesl at her door, holding a small pot of oatmeal.

It wasn't anything she had said that convinced Liesl, Audra realized, but the house itself. Throwing out the ill-smelling coffee from the night before and taking the sack of coffee beans from the pantry, Liesl had stared at the assortment of supplies on the shelves and shaken her head. As Audra ate the oatmeal, thick with raisins and topped with a sprinkling of cinnamon, Liesl had filled the coffeepot at the sink, pausing to look through the windows at the yard and the barn. "You can have a good-sized garden and room for a chicken coop, too," she had said almost dreamily. Audra had bitten down on her spoon so hard that she thought she might have left marks. Not that she hadn't encountered chicken coops in the city, but she had never, ever dreamed of having one. The next morning Liesl had been outside her door holding a plate of slices of bread dipped in batter and fried, a small bowl of fruit preserves pressing against the bread. They had gone through the same routine, Audra eating and Liesl looking out the window over the sink and remarking, this time, that a "lively little mare" was for sale, "perfect" for the buggy housed in the barn. And so those first days had passed until Sunday morning, when Liesl and the children had come to the house to "escort" her to church (Audra hadn't bothered to disguise her dismay, but Liesl refused to take pity on her, the corners of her mouth quirking up in amusement) and then to the sheriff's house for dinner. The house seemed cramped or perhaps it was that Liesl was having more difficulty navigating a course through it, her belly brushing and nudging against everything. "Liesl," Audra had groaned in impatience, using her first name without thinking, "the baby's being knocked about like bowling pins here, and in your mind, you've planted the garden and hatched the first chicks at the _Journal_ 's house."

"It's your house. You've said that you've wanted space for yourself," Liesl had stubbornly maintained, not taking exception to Audra's familiarity and not denying the truth of what she had said.

"I have my own room, I have my own bed. That's more space than I've ever had in my life. The rest of it I'm willing to share, and it should be obvious to you by now that I'll never keep it up like I should. You're the one who's already making it a home. You see that, don't you? You've all but bought the horse for the barn." Liesl had turned away from her to take plates out of the cupboard. The boys, still dressed in their Sunday clothes, fidgeted as they waited for release from church clothes and church behavior. "What have you named it?"

"Named it?" Liesl had repeated unconvincingly.

"What have you named the horse?" Audra had said sternly.

"She has a name, Socks, because she has three white fetlocks." Liesl had tried to stare down Audra, but Audra figured she had had more brothers and sisters to practice on than Liesl, because Liesl eventually looked away, blushing. Seeking distraction, she wiped her hands on a dish towel. "She's more elegant than 'Socks.' I've been calling her Lotte."

And with the needless wiping of her hands and the "Lotte" that still hung in the air had come Liesl's capitulation.

Initially she had insisted upon paying rent, even when Audra had argued that her cooking and helping to keep the house in order were more valuable to her than money. Audra found the exchange so ludicrously weighted in her favor that she had insisted, in turn, upon paying Liesl wages. That had been her original proposal, after all, for Liesl to work as her housekeeper, but Liesl had grimly shaken her head, and Audra had been wise enough to let the matter rest. She hadn't yet found a successful argument for persuading Liesl to take more money from her than was necessary to purchase staples and other necessities from the general store - she couldn't say "emporium" with a straight face - but Liesl deserved far more than a roof over her head for the transformation she had worked upon the house.

The house was large and well-built, but the paucity of furniture in the rooms and the dust covers that had covered the few pieces like shrouds had given it the air of a mausoleum. Audra had done little to enliven her new home. She had hung up her dresses and taken off the cover over one chair. Within a few days of moving in, Liesl had successfully created the illusion that she and the boys had always lived there. Curtains were opened, rugs beaten, floors swept and scrubbed, linens aired, and the rooms, with the addition of Liesl's furniture, made inviting. Audra would pass the parlor and wish that she had the time to sit in the rocking chair with one of Liesl's detective novels. Instead of her footsteps echoing throughout the house, Will's and Gus's chatter and Liesl's affectionate, sometimes scolding responses banished the silence. Audra had thought she wouldn't miss the uproar and chaos of Nan's home, and she was right, she didn't. But the size and the quietness of the house had been more daunting than she had anticipated. New York was a big city, but the prairie . . . it was vast.

With the calm assurance of a chatelaine, Liesl had ordered her brother and the men he had brought with him to move her belongings to the house to take that very same furniture they had just finished depositing and transfer it to another room and then, if she thought of an even better arrangement, to take it back out. Despite the fact that her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows and her hair was escaping the elaborate twist into which she had bound it, Liesl could have been the wife of a rich farmer or rancher. No, no, with those fine features and the authority written across them, she could have been the wife of a governor, a senator, an Astor or Vanderbilt, not the unpaid housekeeper of the editor of a country newspaper. The day would come, Audra knew, when that rich farmer or rancher would wed her, but until then she could hope that some of Liesl's domestic skills would, if only through a miracle equal to that of the loaves and fishes, become her own.

"Does the 'unpleasant thought' have anything to do with the fact that the press isn't running?" Liesl knew the _Journal_ 's schedule. There was little about this office and the machines in it that she didn't know. Audra had thought her familiarity was the result of her brother's temporary running of the paper in the absence of an editor, but Liesl had offered her a strangely pained smile, saying, "No, my history with the _Journal_ is older than that." She would have considered asking for Liesl's help with the press if these last weeks before the baby was due weren't so clearly a burden on her. For the past several nights, she had heard Liesl pacing the floor, unable to sleep for the discomfort of the heat, her two small bedmates, and the third Lattimer, who was kicking with impatience to be let out into the world. Yet she was no less lovely for the signs of exhaustion, her pallor and the dark circles under her eyes making her more the Camille of Dumas's melodrama than Nan Pawlik, who had also slept little through the last few weeks of her pregnancies. Fatigue didn't enhance the beauty of the Clarke women; it threw into relief the asymmetrical composition of their faces, the abundance of their freckles, and, in Audra's case, the thinness of her lips.

To resent the unfairness of a world in which the lovely suffered but suffered prettily was as futile as resenting the injustice that a poor but lovely woman was likelier to change her station in life that a poor and plain one. A woman like Liesl Albrecht wouldn't have had to give the gangling, jug-eared Frank Thornton, with his almost frighteningly large teeth, a second look and then a third and a fourth because she had begun to fear that no man would look her, or look at her only to tell her to fetch him his pipe and his afternoon glass of "tea," as her father had done, or to direct her to edit the copy for advertisements, as almost every editor she had worked for had done, because the real work of a newspaper was reserved for men.

"Where's Hans?" The edge to Liesl's voice was unmistakable. Not for her a dwelling on her loveliness and all the differences that followed from it. Audra might have thought that her sharpness was a symptom of her exhaustion except for the fact that the sharpness was nearly always there when Hans was the subject of a conversation. It was no less there when Hans was present. Audra had heard it when she first met him, the afternoon of her first full day in Sweetwater. Liesl, brushing aside Audra's protests that she could familiarize herself with the _Journal_ on her own, accompanied her to the office, Will and Bruno in train. The door was open and a man was bent over the press. Liesl had called out to him, and he had turned around, his expression a mixture of sheepishness and exasperation. Will and Bruno were both joyously greeting him, but after a pat to each head, he had crossed the room to introduce himself to Audra, the sheepishness predominating as he apologized for not having been in Sweetwater the day before "as I promised her," pointing to Liesl. Then, as he greeted his sister, the sheepishness gave way to exasperation. "By the time Claudia and I finished fixing the irrigation system, it was too late to get here before midnight." Liesl had accepted his explanation in silence, her eyes darting to the press and Will's attempt to climb it. "You're better able to explain things here than I am," she had said finally. "I need to get Will and the dog home before they wreck the office." She had pressed Audra to join them for supper, but Audra had declined, declaring that she would be spending the evening with the _Journal_. Pickles, crackers, and hard-boiled eggs, all of which she could buy at the general store, would be supper enough. Liesl had opened her mouth as if ready to argue with her but she had turned and called to Will instead, saying only to Audra as she passed her on their way out, "There'll be plenty of food, if you change your mind."

Hans had rubbed his head after they left, smiling in amusement and saying to Audra, "She doesn't give up so easy. Don't be surprised if she comes back." He was tall like Liesl and he had the same dimple in his chin, but his rough-cut shock of hair was a dull brown and his eyes were closer to green than blue. He wasn't an unhandsome man, but unlike his sister, he didn't look like he had been misplaced from a medieval romance of knights and their ladies. His accent was much stronger, and he more frequently fumbled for the appropriate words in English. Audra also learned over the course of the next days and weeks that there were other ways in which he significantly differed from his sister. Hans had a concept of time that was only loosely bound to calendars and clocks. "Tomorrow" was just as often the day after, or even the day after that, and Audra was left to wonder how the _Journal_ was ever published after Jonas Simcoe's departure. Stories that Hans would cheerfully tell her about running the press all night to meet the delivery schedule answered one question only to raise another - how the citizens of Sweetwater managed to sleep through the racket.

What appeared to serve as Hans's rising and setting sun was Claudia Donovan and her multiple scientific endeavors, which was another source of tension between brother and sister. When Mr. Abernathy, the town's telegraph operator and postmaster, commented on the size and number of packages that arrived for Claudia on a weekly basis, Liesl, resembling a summer day in a dress of deep blue, chuckled and predicted that someday one of her inventions would change the world. But when Hans airily declared that he wouldn't be in Sweetwater the rest of the week because Claudia needed his help with the combustion engine she was building for the Donovan Flyer, which, he declared proudly, would beat anything the Duryea brothers had built, the summer day of Liesl's face clouded over, threatening storms. "Shouldn't you talk to Audra first?"

This thunderclap had happened over the dinner table a few nights later, and Audra, suddenly deciding she wanted seconds of the game birds that Liesl had prepared, practically toppled her chair in her hurry to take her plate over to the range. They were tender, whatever birds they were, and she would much rather stuff her mouth with them than say anything that would seem to suggest that she didn't need Hans for the days he proposed to be gone, because whether she or Claudia Donovan was in greater need of Hans's assistance wasn't really the issue. Her sense that Liesl's objection to her brother spending more time at the Donovan ranch had little to do with his responsibilities elsewhere was confirmed later that night. She had returned from the _Journal_ 's office after having spent the better part of two hours writing and rewriting next week's editorial on the importance of public libraries, a subject of controversy in Sweetwater, she was dismayed to discover. Closing the back door softly behind her so that she wouldn't wake the boys, she heard Liesl and Hans arguing in a mixture of English and German. They weren't arguing loudly, but in the quiet of the night, their voices carried to the kitchen.

"She's a young woman, _eine junge Frau_ , Hans. You understand what I'm saying. It's one thing to be working together on one of her machines in the middle of the day, it's another to be camping on the banks of Jackrabbit Creek to hunt for those . . . little animal skeletons. _Es ist unziemlich_."

" _Fossilien_ . . . fossils," he supplied irritably, and Audra, standing uncertainly in the kitchen, was surprised that he was the one providing the word in English and not his sister. "We weren't alone. Steve Jinks was with us. _Sie hatte einen chaperon_ ," he added as sulkily as Will might.

" _Ein anderer mann ist kein chaperon_ ," Liesl retorted.

"Steve is like a brother to her. Everyone knows that."

" _Bist du auch ein bruder_?" After a silence, Liesl said, "People will talk. They have talked. How do you think I know that you and Claudia were out all night together? Marta told me. People will talk," she repeated, "and what they say won't be kind."

Although she had said it gently, Hans began talking rapidly in German. Audra didn't have to understand what he was saying to know that he was accusing Liesl of something; given his scornful tone, Audra could only assume it was some questionable act that his sister had committed. While she wasn't sure when one word left off and another began, she recognized the name Marguerite, which he mentioned several times. When he finished, Liesl responded in a voice so lifeless that Audra thought she would much rather bear the brunt of her anger. "You know nothing of her, our friendship, or her marriage. We won't speak of her again."

If she had been raised in a more forgiving family, or at least a smaller one, Audra might not have trained herself in those minor duplicities that allowed her to give lie to the fact that she had seen and heard what she wasn't supposed to have seen or heard. Noiselessly stepping back to the door, she made a great production of opening and closing it. Then, searching for every creaking floorboard, she made sure she placed her full weight on it as she went down the hall to the parlor. Liesl was in the rocking chair, a hand resting on her belly, and Hans was sitting on the sofa, morosely staring at the carpet. Liesl opened her eyes and smiled at her wanly.

"I've finished making my pitch for a library in Sweetwater, and now I'm ready to reward myself." Audra adopted a pleading expression that she had seen the boys successfully employ. "I was hoping we might have more of the kir . . . key . . ." she faltered charmingly.

"Kuchenrolle," Liesl said, her expression becoming more animated. "Yes, I think we can all do with more kuchenrolle."

It hadn't been entirely in service of a distraction, although her plea for more kuchenrolle had successfully served as one that night. Audra liked kuchenrolle, especially when Liesl made it with jam, and she eyed the wrapped items Liesl had taken from the basket with the anticipation that one of them was some of the kuchenrolle that Liesl had been making when she left the house in the morning. Her hand hovered over the likeliest shape until Liesl deliberately moved it out of reach. "Where's Hans? Why isn't he here helping you?" She pushed herself away from the desk with a little grunt and went over to the press to inspect it. "Is it something I can help you with?"

"One of the cylinders needs to be realigned," Audra said, joining her at the press.

"Just tell me what to do, and we'll get it reset." Liesl began rolling up the sleeves of her dress.

"Liesl . . . ." Audra was blushing, feeling all the guiltier for having let the thought, no, wish that she could ask Liesl to help her linger in her mind. "You're -"

"Pregnant?" Liesl said dryly. "It's not the same as helpless. Besides, maybe the extra exertion will help to push her out. She and I are both ready for it."

She. Liesl had been referring to the baby more and more frequently as a girl, and although Audra had grown up hearing women predict the sex of their children based on, among other things, how low they carried the baby, how active it was, or how sick of a morning they continued to be, Liesl relied on no such indicators, explaining, when Mary asked her as they removed pans of delicately glazed strudel how she could be so certain, that "Pete loved the boys, but he always wanted a girl. I don't think God would deny him that now." Audra had been eating a breakfast concoction that Liesl called "muesli," which, while tasty, couldn't compare to the pastries cooling on the counter. Other than her quiet responses to what Audra felt were her own awkward, occasionally blundering, references to the sheriff and her polite acceptance of the condolences still offered to her by the townspeople, Liesl didn't talk about her husband. She even more rarely gave way to the grief that still had to overwhelm her less than six months after his death. Audra would come down the stairs in the middle of the night, unable to sleep for the quiet, and sometimes see Liesl at the kitchen table, holding her head in her hands. Though she would want to offer her comfort, even something as small as a press of her hand or a cup of coffee, there would be something so private in the way Liesl's hands shielded her face that Audra would turn around and go back to her bedroom.

There were so few of the typical invocations of what Pete would have said or done were he still with her that Audra was reminded of him only when someone called Liesl "Mrs. Lattimer" or compared him to the new sheriff, a taciturn, rawboned man who kept malefactors - and everyone else - at bay with a threatening scowl. While Sweetwater was adjusting to his humorless maintenance of law and order, it missed the easygoing Pete Lattimer. Audra heard reminiscences of him at the telegraph office, the barbershop, the livery, the Spur, the places where men gathered to gossip and called it business. The women, too, when they met at the general store or exchanged small talk after Sunday services would fondly recall his boyish ways. Sheriff Lattimer was a subject of conversation everywhere except home. When she did refer to him, Liesl's voice didn't have the deadened quality that it had carried when she told her brother that they were never to speak of Marguerite again, yet Audra couldn't help but think that Liesl's husband presided over a similarly barren space within her.

As Liesl gingerly felt around the cylinder that had pulled away from the other, Audra had visions of her grabbing it and trying to wrest it back into alignment, which were immediately followed by visions of Liesl's arm trapped in the press or her belly jammed into a protruding part, with disastrous consequences for Pete Lattimer's last child and only daughter (if Liesl's belief wasn't founded only on wishes). "Have you thought of a name for her?" Not a particularly inventive or, as Liesl gave a few preliminary tugs at the cylinder, effective means of drawing her attention, but it was all that Audra could think to say.

"Pete's mother's name was Jane. He might like the baby named after her grandmother." Liesl glanced down at her arms, which were smeared with ink.

Audra hastened to bring her a rag from the pile she kept for the endless war she waged against the ink that was sprayed when the press was running, fine droplet that found every inch of exposed skin when the press seemed especially, even maliciously, inclined to make a mess. "You're going to ruin your dress," Audra chided her.

"It's covered with flour and egg and pawprints and, I think, snot where Gus grabbed it to wipe his nose. What's a little ink?" But she took the rag from Audra and wiped her hands and wrists. "Pete named the boys," she said abruptly. "Will is named after one of his friends from the Army and Gus, Pete thought he should have a German name or one that sounded German, anyway, and Gus was born in August, so . . . ." She threaded the rag through her hands. "He saw them so clearly so early on. Sometimes of an evening, he would put his head here," Liesl's hand strayed over her belly, "and he would talk to them. Maybe they told him what their names should be." Her expression grew wistful. "If my daughter is whispering her name, I can't hear her." She suddenly bunched the rag and threw it onto the workbench that Hans had built; old parts of the press that he would sometimes tinker with strewn along it. Adopting a brighter tone, she said, "Perhaps you can suggest one for her. Or are you saving the ones you like for your children?"

"I'm no more looking to find a husband now than I was six weeks ago. If I'd picked out names for children, I would happily give them to you."

Liesl's eyes darted to the door. "That doesn't mean a man looking for a wife won't find you."

Audra turned around and saw Dr. Napier outside the _Journal_ 's door. She felt her face warming as he entered the office and took his hat, an old-fashioned top hat in an impeccably brushed black wool, from his head. The top hat was in many ways emblematic of the doctor, who was a little old-fashioned himself and always painstakingly groomed. Liesl had introduced them on Audra's first visit to the Lutheran church. At first she had felt grateful for the reprieve from having to make conversation with Pastor Nordquist and his wife after the end of the service; having to endure their small jokes, which made much of her appearance in the church as a "first step" in her abandonment of the "ways of Rome," was worse than having had to sit through the sermon. But as she became aware of the eyes of the women, curious, surprised, jealous, who watched the doctor's little bow and witnessed his pleasure at hearing that she was from New York - "One of my favorite cities," he had cried - she grew increasingly ill at ease, and she couldn't stop staring at his "clean, strong hands." That was what one of the neighbor women had called them, when Liesl had taken her to the _Journal_ 's house and introduced her to the families who lived nearby. She had no sooner made her first appearance than every woman she met was looking to marry her off. The doctor's hands were well shaped and well cared for, the nails and nail beds free of dirt. Yes, they were very clean and they looked strong.

She was never entirely sure what she had said to him. He had asked about her New York, where in the city she had lived and what she missed most about it. She feared that she had mainly blushed and stared at his hands and then blushed all the harder. His voice had a slight drawl, a consequence, she later learned, of his having grown up in Washington D.C., his father having served as a senator for many years. She had also learned after Sunday that the women of Sweetwater were divided over what was the most attractive of his attractive traits, his drawl, his neatly trimmed mustache, his thickly lashed dark eyes. He was as handsome as Liesl was lovely, and seeing them together as she did now in the _Journal_ 's office, Audra was struck as she always was by the thought that in someone's fairy tale, not Grimm's, these two would have been the prince and the princess united in marriage at the end. And then, like always, when she saw the two interact, she dismissed the thought as absurd. Dr. Napier was deferential; in the company of women, his drawl would become more pronounced, and his courtliness almost theatrical. Yet when he was with Liesl, he seemed more aware that he was performing and his performance had a knowing, comic air. In turn, she treated with him a familiarity that Audra had seen her show no man except Hans; it was warm and teasing and . . . sisterly.

He looked at the remains of their dinner and then at Liesl's rolled sleeves and the streaks of ink on her forearms. "I'm not sure what I've interrupted, Miss Clarke, a meal or an operation on the printing press." He smiled at her, showing teeth that were straight and, unlike Frank's, perfectly proportional. His smile at Liesl was both admonishing and ironic. "I don't believe you have a license, Mrs. Lattimer, to be taking apart heavy machinery."

"I don't have licenses for anything I do, but it still gets done." She placed her hands on her hips and stared at him challengingly.

He put his hand over his heart. "If you're trying to wound my professional vanity . . . ."

"I don't waste my time on the impossible," she teased him in return. "If you're willing to get those fine doctor's hands dirty, perhaps you can help us fix the press."

"Never let it be said that a Napier refused two lovely women his assistance." Over Audra's protests, he laid his suit coat over a chair and folded the sleeves of his blindingly white shirt, not likely to remain white for very much longer. She almost told him he should take it off, too, and then she realized how it would sound, and she felt another hard blush overtake her. In her confusion, she watched them grapple alone with the press, the dark head almost touching the blond, and she felt a tumult of emotions then, inexplicable and sourceless and less confusing than they were unsettling, but out of them came one feeling as strong as it was disturbing, which was that those two heads shouldn't be so close together or, more to the point, that the picture of the two of them, framed as they were by the press, was wrong, as though one of them was standing in for another whose rightful place was there, next to -

"Audra," Liesl said impatiently, "we need your help."

With a muffled curse at her slowness, her confusion, Audra joined them and somehow, between the three of them, they were able to reset the cylinder. Also miraculously, Dr. Napier's shirt had survived the battle, although his hands were black with oil and ink, and he held them up helplessly. Liesl went outside to draw a bucket of water from the pump, and Audra passed him several rags. He blanched at the bar of soap that Liesl set beside the bucket on the workbench, but he gamely smiled and scrubbed his hands with it. "I think we can call that a success," he said, using the cleanest of the rags as a drying towel. "Even better, the patient didn't utter a word of complaint."

He hadn't yet said why he had stopped by, and Liesl, with an arch of her eyebrows at Audra, returned to the desk and began repacking the basket, leaving out a knife and one of the wrapped items. "I've left Mary alone with the boys too long." She grinned at the both of them. "I'm hoping you'll finish the bit of kuchenrolle I brought. I made too much for the hotel."

Flustered and a little annoyed at Liesl's obvious attempt to leave her alone with the doctor, Audra piled the wet rags together and made to take the bucket out to the back, but Dr. Napier put a hand on her wrist. It was very clean once again, and she noticed for the first time the fine black hair on his forearm. There were women in Sweetwater who would envy her the sight of that forearm, the gentle, distinctly undoctorly pressure of that hand. "I think we deserve some kuchenrolle, don't you, Miss Clarke?"

She set the bucket down. Did she like the sight of his forearm and the touch of his hand? She didn't honestly know. She was about to charge off to the desk and wildly slice kuchenrolle, just to do something other than to stand and stare at his hand on her arm, when she heard him call out to Liesl, "I was also coming to see you, Mrs. Lattimer. I wanted to see how you and the baby are doing."

Liesl was at the door. "She was kicking strong enough when we were fixing the press that I'm surprised you didn't feel it, Dr. Napier. She's feeling fine, and I'll start feeling better in about," her free hand drifted down to her belly, "four weeks."

"Mrs. Lattimer," he said warningly.

"I would run and hide but I can't do either these days," she said dryly. "If you need to examine me, you'll find me at home." This time, instead of arching her eyebrows, she directed an impish smile at Audra. "But, please, take your time, Dr. Napier."

They didn't eat the kuchenrolle in complete silence, but with Liesl gone, Audra sensed she wasn't the only one who felt constrained. Despite the fact that he had left his suit coat hanging over the back of the chair and his shirtsleeves folded, Dr. Napier seemed more formal now than when he had first dropped in. He was eating the pastry with a hearty appetite, however, and he viewed the remains of the kuchenrolle, a scattering of crumbs, with dismay. "I often think she should go into business for herself," he said admiringly. "I've had pastries in cities up and down the East that aren't half as good."

"I've thought the same," Audra admitted. "About her going into business, that is. I've never been outside New York, I mean, I wasn't, until I came here." Had a handsome man always caused her to lapse into incoherence?

Dr. Napier brightened, seeing his opportunity. "Since you have an interest in faraway places," at Audra's look of disbelief, he said, "and Sweetwater does count as one, Miss Clarke, I thought you might accompany me to the lecture Reverend Grunewald is giving Friday evening."

The Grunewalds were Lutheran missionaries recently returned from four years in China. They were touring the Midwest, giving lectures on their experiences "bringing the love of Christ to our Oriental brothers and sisters," as Pastor Nordquist had described their work during Sunday services. Two hours, at a minimum, sitting in those hard pews, trying to summon interest in an uninterrupted summary of Bible lessons, baptisms, and conversions. The church would be stifling, but she would need to wear one of her better dresses. Warm tea and cookies, not Liesl's, would be offered as the sole refreshments. Audra couldn't imagine anything more hellish, except, perhaps, Hell itself.

Yet she found herself saying yes, unsure that spending an evening listening to tales of missionary life in the Far East in the company of the most desirable bachelor in Sweetwater (and, if the gossip were to be believed, for miles around) was, all things considered, preferable to spending the evening in the _Journal_ 's office. That fine-limbed form was standing and those strong, clean hands were rolling down the shirtsleeves that had been so carefully folded and then lifting the suit coat from the back of the chair. "I'll come for you at 7:00," he said. "I look forward to Friday evening, Miss Clarke."

She assured him that she did, too. She was being truthful. He was handsome, courteous, and, apparently, well traveled. He was also a senator's son; Frank Thornton was a barkeep's son. How could her head not be turned a little by the attentions of a man, who, had they met elsewhere, wouldn't have spared her Frank's second look? He should have been smiling winningly and flirting winningly with the matrons of New York and Boston as he took their pulses and listened to their complaints. Yet he had chosen Sweetwater. A senator's son had chosen this dusty spot on the prairie? Maybe he was a missionary of sorts himself, devoting himself to providing medical care for which he could easily charge patients on the East Coast two and three times as much. Or perhaps he had been driven here by something else. . . . There was a story, she sensed, behind Dr. Napier's presence in Sweetwater. Perhaps he would share some of it with her Friday evening.

Audra stayed later in the office that day, making up for the time she lost when the press hadn't been running, but it was still light when she walked home. She could see Liesl and the boys coming out of the barn. They would have been making sure Lotte was settled for the night. More accurately, they would have been seeing the rest of her advance and a note payable settled for the evening. Will would have been begging his mother to let him ride the pony, while Gus would have been chewing on pieces of straw he had picked up from the floor - and out of his mother's eyesight. She had come home too late for another riding lesson, thankfully. Liesl was a patient teacher, but Audra knew a sworn enemy when she saw one, and Lotte didn't obey a single one of her commands unless Liesl, with a touch on the reins or her flank, seconded it. Surreptitiously she rubbed a buttock. There was something even less enjoyable than an evening spent in a hot, stuffy church listening to the Grunewalds discuss their years in China, one "saved" life at a time.

This late the sun didn't illuminate so much as it burnished, and as Liesl stooped to pick up her youngest son, it turned her hair a deeper, richer gold, the gold of the cup that Pastor Nordquist raised during communion, the gold of the trim on the cloth covering the altar. Hoisting Gus and settling him in the crook of her arm, Liesl waved at her, and Audra waved back, feeling her mouth stretch in a wide smile. In this moment, while she would remain unpersuaded that there was such a thing as a higher purpose or eternal life, she might be convinced that a spring evening like this had once graced Eden.


	4. Chapter 4

It was a three-word telegram – "Arriving next Wednesday" – but it was enough to send Audra flying around the _Journal_ 's office, concerned that the clutter and grime wouldn't attest to how busy she had been since she had come to Sweetwater but rather to her inability to manage the paper. She could imagine Helena Wells imperiously running her eyes over the office and her white-gloved finger along the edge of the desk, immaculately outfitted in a dress from a New York shop that wouldn't have had to bar its door to the lowly Clarkes. They wouldn't have been able to afford to look through its windows. Audra grimaced at the dirt streaks on her skirt and the dust graying its hem. She would wear this dress on Sunday, when she would find time in the afternoon to sweep and mop the floor, wash the windows, and either file or burn the drafts and extra copies of the invitations, auction notices, and sundry other communications that never made it into the _Journal_ but were equally essential to the well-being of a community. The good townspeople might be aghast at her working on a Sunday, but it was the only time she had.

She would also have to sneak out of the house or fashion a convincing lie to keep Liesl from declaring that she and the boys would accompany her to help. The baby seemed to have doubled in size over the past month, making it so difficult for Liesl to bend over or kneel without some assistance in righting herself that Audra was brought to mind of a river barge grounded on a sandbar, a comparison she would never dare say aloud. Whether it was the greater discomfort or the unrelenting heat, or the two in combination, Liesl was uncharacteristically irritable and then even more remorseful once the irritation passed. Hans uncharitably referred to her snappishness and the tears that would follow as her "hankie times" but only after she would leave the room, handkerchief pressed to her eyes.

Audra had witnessed worse outbursts during Nan's pregnancies, when she had angrily flung vegetables into pots and tin dishes into the sink and muttered that she would "cut it off" while her husband slept. Yet the only muffled squeals and shrieks Audra ended up hearing through the thin walls of Nan and Jim's bedroom were Nan's, and they hadn't been sounds of outrage. They had only heralded a resumption of the cycle, which, six, seven, eight months later would have Nan abusing pie dough with a rolling pin and her sisters' hearing with promises that "I mean it this time, I'm cutting it off." Of course Liesl no longer had a husband to bear the brunt of her frustration, and Audra thought that not having Pete, especially as the baby's birth drew near, was another reason she cried so easily now. That was a thought that Audra didn't say aloud in Liesl's presence either.

Myka and Helena were coming, the _Journal_ 's office wasn't even as clean as Lotte's stall, Liesl could go into labor at any moment, and, worst of all, her running of the _Journal_ had led to no great change, in its fortunes or the town's. A public library, a school large enough to hold Sweetwater's ever-increasing number of children, a sanitation system (or at least the recognition that sanitation was a civic good) were some of the proposals she had promoted on the opinion page. A few brave souls had written letters in support of her editorials, and Audra had published them – just as she had published the much larger number of letters either ridiculing such "high-minded, big city notions" or complaining of the taxation necessary to fund them. She had thought that her editorial arguing the benefits of paving the main street would win greater support since it was more modest in scope and cost, but the howls of outrage hadn't lessened. Based on the vociferousness of the objections (many she couldn't publish because after the salutation – if there was one – there followed only a string of curses), she thought she might actually experience what it was like to be ridden out of town on a rail. Yet when the same men greeted her in the street or the general store, they made no reference to her antecedents, her sex, or her perversion thereof; they politely asked after her health and genially commented on the weather. Slowly she came to understand that much like those who put pen to paper to inveigh against the _Banner_ 's editorials, the _Journal_ 's readers viewed the clash of opinions as a blood sport. By the same token, however, while Mr. Burns might not wholly believe that she had shamed her mother, her grandmother, and all womanhood when she published an editorial supporting secondary education for those girls who wanted it, he remained firmly against the idea of allowing girls to attend school beyond the sixth grade.

Audra never became so despairing that she considered sending a letter of resignation to Myka and boarding a train to St. Paul (and from there to Chicago and New York) the same day, but there were times when the sight of Liesl taking a pie or a pastry from the oven would fail to lighten her mood. Those were the nights when the boys would play quietly on the rug in the parlor (Will with his collection of tin soldiers and Gus with his blocks) and Bruno would silently curl up at Will's feet. Sometimes Audra would retreat to her room, but more often she would ask Liesl to read to her once the boys were put to bed. She would let Liesl's voice, its calm, unhurried pace perfectly matched to the calm, unhurried analysis of the crime by the mystery's hero, sweep her concerns away.

Audra's battles with the majority of the _Journal_ 's readers hadn't diminished Dr. Napier's interest in inviting her to accompany him to the charity events and lectures hosted by Sweetwater's churches. Although she suspected that he was no more devout than she was, he had a better appreciation of the fact that there would be virtually no opportunities to meet eligible members of the opposite sex without the churches' intercession. While she mourned the absence of theaters and parks, reading libraries and the numerous "societies" that offered diversion through a variety of activities, from debates on the topical issues of the day to birdwatching, he would describe, without irony, the enjoyment that might be had, that would be had if only she would grant him the privilege of escorting her to Pastor Wallace's Wednesday night lecture on St. Paul. If it were a fundraising supper for a sister church in a foreign country or for the intrepid missionaries, they might attend it with Liesl and the children, Dr. Napier carrying the baked goods that were the joint Lattimer-Clarke contribution. At other times, Liam's good friend, Steve Jinks, would join them, having ridden into town earlier on business for the Donovan ranch. While Mr. Jinks was no less practiced in his courtliness than Liam, it was more perfunctory, and at times Audra thought that she saw in eyes as blue as Liesl's a cool disapproval.

She was no proper match for Liam, she knew it. As Nan might say, he was prettier by far than she was, and his family boasted a true lineage, traceable back to a minor branch of the Stuart family, or so Liam claimed with a self-mocking smile. The Napier who came to the United States in the middle of the 18th century brought his sense of privilege with him, and for almost 150 years, the Napier men had prided themselves on being gentlemen, above both employment and the rough and tumble of American politics. In that sense, Liam's father and Liam himself were the black sheep of the family, not only rubbing shoulders with the common man but, in John Napier's case, regularly shaking hands with him over the successful passage of a bill in Congress and, in Liam's case, attending to his illnesses. The Clarke family history, by contrast, had its origins in an impoverished immigrant who had taken his surname from a street sign. Yet if Liam yearned for a woman more feminine and with the graces that a man of his class could expect, he never showed it. He wasn't yet assiduous in his attentions, but he had prevailed upon her to call him Liam, and Audra was aware that they were already exciting some gossip about whether an "understanding" existed yet between them.

She considered the gossip a more reliable sign of the dearth of entertainment in the town than the seriousness of his intentions. He had done nothing more than kiss her hand after walking her back to her home, and he had yet to press her for greater intimacies or more time alone. He was different in every respect from Frank Thornton, who persisted in letting his hands roam no matter how often she slapped them away, who had alternately wheedled and shamed her into tolerating his greater and greater license. "Aw, honey, we're practically engaged," he would start, "Can't you let me" and then he would do what it was he had in mind without waiting for her permission. Worse was the sudden anger that would overtake him when she refused to let him push her skirt any farther up her leg or removed his hand when it tried to cup her breasts. "If you're not the coldest fish," he would say or "There are other girls who wouldn't turn down a kiss from me." She knew there were other girls who would find his groping of them stimulating or at least worth suffering in silence because, as her sisters never failed to remind her, he was a marriageable man. So she had slowly but steadily surrendered until there was nothing that she hadn't surrendered, and even then it hadn't been enough because there had, in fact, been another girl . . . .

Audra stopped, feeling a wave of heat rising from the ground to beat at her. The sun had already dipped below the horizon, yet her every step worked a bellows, forcing from the parched grass and earth a superheated gust of air. She wasn't far from the house, she had only the rest of the field to cross, but she felt like she had miles more to go. Ordinarily the lights at the windows would urge her on, but tonight they presaged only more heat. The old men who squatted outside the general store played the role of the town's unofficial barometer, and they were predicting a stormy end to the heat. It was an exaggeration she was sure, but she would swear she hadn't seen a cloud for days, maybe weeks. There had been nothing but sun – the color of butter, the color of goldenrod, the size of a quarter, the size of a dinner plate. It would look one way in the morning, another in the afternoon, and different still at sunset; it reminded Audra of the ladies she would sometimes see stepping down from their fine carriages, so rich they could change dresses several times a day. There were dresses for receiving callers and there were dresses for giving calls, dresses to wear at teas and dresses to wear at dinners. Audra had the same few dresses for every occasion; in this heat, she would wear one for as long as she could stand the smell of her own sweat and then she would put it in the basket of clothes Liesl would wash. Even clean they smelled faintly of sweat.

Nothing smelled clean, nothing felt clean. Water was becoming more precious than gold. The special plumbing system that Helena and Claudia Donovan had devised for the house was vanquished by the drought; turning the handle on the kitchen faucet produced only a trickle of water at best. Liesl was having to go outside and pump water directly from the well, and even pumping from the well had grown harder. When she had pumped enough water, she would have to go through the more exquisite torture of heating it. The room off the kitchen in which she washed their clothes would reach temperatures suitable for a foundry, and when Liesl emerged with a heap of wet shifts and dresses and boy-sized overalls to hang on the line to dry, her face and arms would be little drier than the clothes, and her hair would be unwinding from its coil, spilling over her shoulders, light like the grains in the burlap sacks at the general store that Audra continued to call by the wrong names, oats for barley, barley for millet, but so much softer . . . .

Audra blinked and pressed on. She would go directly to the well and pump a bucket of water. She imagined upending it over her head and almost wriggled at the pleasure of it. But that would be wasteful. She would carry the bucket into the house and use the dipper to ladle herself a glass; she would use the dipper again to wet a cloth that she could hold against the back of her neck. Not the immersion she desired, but a small relief nonetheless. She shuffled up the steps of the back porch. She touched the knob of the screen door to pull it open only to let her hand fall. It wasn't so dim that she couldn't make Liesl out at the table. Usually Liesl would have lit the lamp by now, but as slight as the heat it generated was, it was still heat and therefore intolerable. There was a pail at her feet, and she was squeezing a cloth over the bodice of her dress. Except that her bodice had been unbuttoned and Liesl was wearing no shift underneath it. Her breasts, pale in the dimness, were almost freed from the material, and Audra had a confused and confusing image of working her hand underneath them, much like she would newly born kittens or puppies, feeling their heartbeats pulse rapidly against her palm.

She rocked backward, unsure whether Liesl had seen her, unsure that, if she had, Liesl would care. It had been so hot for so long that observing the proprieties seemed needless exertion. But this was an exertion that had to be made, a propriety that demanded to be observed, and Audra wondered at her trembling as she scraped the soles of her shoes across the floor of the porch and rattled the doorknob. She had accidentally interrupted her sisters disrobing or engaging in an intimate washing numerous times; privacy had been hard to come by in the ever-expanding Clarke and Pawlik families. The embarrassment had always been brief and quickly forgotten on both sides; she wasn't merely embarrassed now, however, she was mortified.

There were sounds of a chair squeaking and of something wetter, as though in her surprise, Liesl had dropped the cloth in the pail or kicked the pail hard enough to send water sloshing over its side. There were a few crossly muttered words in German, the flare of the lamp, and Liesl, dress rebuttoned, was at the door, opening it for Audra. "I can't promise a cold supper," she was saying wryly as she retreated in front of Audra to reach for a plate, covered by a dish towel, on the counter, "but it's no more than lukewarm."

Liesl sat with her as she picked at the bread and jam, the nearly liquefied cheese, and they exchanged their small stories of the day. It might have been a night like others, coming home to a meal that Liesl had saved for her and casually talking with her as she ate, but she hadn't seen Liesl's breasts on those nights, and she couldn't help noticing that Liesl hadn't buttoned every button. At the base of her throat the top two buttons weren't fastened, and that small arrow-shaped patch of Liesl's skin visible between the edges of the material so teased Audra's attention that she ended up eating five slices of the bread instead of her usual three just so she could focus her eyes on something else, such as her slathering the bread with jam. There was nothing risqué in the effect of those two unbuttoned buttons, Liesl's breasts were securely covered, and the part of her chest that was exposed was so far north of them that Audra could just as well have been darting glances at the back of her hand or forearm. Yet the direction of that vee of cloth was unmistakable, and though she knew Liesl's breasts were like her own (but bigger) or Nan's (but smaller), they also seemed entirely unlike them. They made of Liesl's body a mystery that Audra wouldn't have thought before to ascribe to it, and it made her conscious of Liesl in a way she instinctively knew that she didn't welcome.

Later she lay in her bed, sleepless, blaming the heat, but it wasn't the heat that had her arms pressed as flat to the bed as if they had been nailed. For the first time since the Lattimers had moved into the house, Audra was intensely aware of the fact that Liesl slept in the bedroom across the hall. Except that tonight Liesl wouldn't be able to sleep either, overheated and uncomfortable. What was she thinking about? The baby? Her husband? Or was she thinking about how cool the water had felt on her skin, how, if only the pail had been a pool, she could have floated in it, the water lapping over her stomach, her breasts – and, with a groan, Audra crushed the pillow over her head and started counting the minutes until sunrise.

Over the next few days, Audra virtually lived at the _Journal_ 's office, cleaning, organizing, filing, bringing the newspaper's ledger up to date, and attempting to ensure that the printing press was in good order. She would have felt more confident about her efforts if Hans had been there to oversee them, but he was busy addressing a growing list of mechanical breakdowns, from a cash register that refused to ring up totals to telegraph keys that refused to type. Some were the result of a business owner's preference to cut costs by deferring cleaning or care, but many of the problems had only recently announced themselves – after endless days of endless heat. At least the printing press printed – it just complained about it. Hardly anything worked right when it was this hot, Audra conceded, even people. While it wasn't surprising that fights had become more frequent and vicious at the Rusty Spur, it was shocking to see two church elders almost come to blows over money missing from a collection plate. The coins were found underneath a nearby pew, but by then one of the men had grabbed the other by his necktie, threatening to shake the money out of him. Audra's insistence that she would eat dinner at the _Journal_ , making do with preserves and crackers or a tin of baked beans, didn't sit well with Liesl. With a fire that Audra had rarely seen from her, she decided that Mary would be in charge, going forward, with bringing lunches and suppers to the office and that Audra could do as she pleased with them. "Eat them or throw them away. It's all the same to me," Liesl declared with an indifference so poorly assumed that Audra might have laughed had she herself not felt like grabbing the dish Liesl was drying and throwing it to the floor.

The only person in the town who wasn't a cutting remark or a wayward look from committing violence against his neighbor was Helena and Myka's housekeeper, Mrs. Erickson. If she were weakening under the rigors of the summer weather or overwhelmed by everything she had to accomplish before Helena and Myka arrived, she gave no sign of it. Audra, in her periodic strolls along the main street, exchanging the stifling air of the _Journal_ 's office for the stifling air outside, which, though no fresher, was at least different, or so she would have said if anyone had asked her, would walk far enough to note whether Mrs. Erickson was hanging up the sheets to dry or sweeping the porch of the big brick house. The more often Mrs. Erickson was visible and the busier she appeared to be, the closer, Audra had to conclude, Helena and Myka were to arriving. After a glimpse of her, Audra's walk back to the _Journal_ was less a stroll than a barely restrained run. Mrs. Erickson was a better calendar than a calendar.

The housekeeper was a striking figure, her dresses black and relieved only by a cross on a gold necklace. Her hair, rigorously bound up, was white, except for a streak, as black as her dresses, that wound through each coil. Sometimes on her way home in the evenings, Audra would see her outside Sweetwater's straggling perimeter of houses, stooping to examine something hidden deep in the grass, a flower that had found a secret source of moisture or a nest of mice (or an animal equally as small and skittery - and stupid not to have left for places more hospitable), her black dress an ink smudge against the horizon. She didn't seem uncomfortable in her surroundings or appalled by how people could stand such sameness, sun, grass, sky and then sun, grass, sky the next day and the day after that one and all the days that followed, differentiated only by where they fell in the week. Even then, Audra sometimes lost track of whether it Tuesday or Thursday, keeping track of the days as they passed only by the _Journal_ 's schedule.

Most of the time, Audra was too tired and, lately, too worn by the heat to be struck by the starkness, the emptiness of the plains. She had heard others describe it as what freedom looked like, but she felt the vastness more imprisoning than freeing. There was no escape from it. Sweetwater didn't have buildings large enough to block out the sky, and it didn't have enough buildings to bury the prairie beneath them. Some in the town had asked her how she could stand being just one of a million in a city, an anonymous face in a crowd of anonymous faces. But she had never felt so small or unimportant in New York as she did in Sweetwater. These raw, unfinished slabs of earth and sky, between which Sweetwater seemed perilously set, they would crush her.

Maybe it was because she had grown accustomed to associating Mrs. Erickson with the big rambling brick house and the big rambling prairie that Audra was shocked to see her enter the _Journal_ 's office. She must have carried the prairie in with her because the office suddenly seemed small and cluttered, and Audra tripped over a stack of paper as she went to greet her. If Mrs. Erickson found the _Journal_ 's office confining, she betrayed no hint of it. She seemed rather to take no notice of the office at all, black skirt skimming the floor as she met Audra at the desk. "Mrs. Wells telegraphed me first thing this morning to make sure that I invited you to supper this evening." There might have been a dry inflection to "invited" that acknowledged it was closer in meaning to "commanded," but Mrs. Erickson's habits of speech were as unvarying as her attire – she said everything with the slow, careful neutrality of a banker appraising the value of a homesteader's possessions.

"It's Wednesday already, isn't it?" Audra asked with a dismay that was its own confirmation.

"Her train arrives in just a few hours, and I've already received several telegrams from her. She's ready to get to work." Again there was that inflection, lightly underscoring "several," and Audra saw, not a handful of telegrams covering a desk or table but a mountain of them, and yet she had no doubt that Mrs. Erickson would, as methodically as if she had weeks to attend to them, emerge from the telegrams and start carrying out her employer's charges. "She's taken great interest in your editorials, Miss Clarke, and I believe she wants to discuss with you her ideas for putting some of those proposals into action." Mrs. Erickson's features were too irregularly arranged for beauty, eyes, nose, and cheekbones squeezed close together in a narrow face, but when she smiled and they reclaimed their proper space, Audra imagined that she had been once, about the time that Mr. Erickson entered the picture, a very fetching young woman. "Supper will be at 7:00. Be prepared, she's not been this excited about returning to Sweetwater in a very long time."

Helena didn't look excited when Audra promptly showed up at the front door several minutes before 7:00. She looked regal in a dark blue dress with lace so white at the collar and cuffs that Audra was convinced she must be wearing it for the first time. Nothing in Sweetwater looked bright or new or unblemished for long. Audra had almost expected a footman or butler to open the door, but Helena didn't appear to think she was lowering herself by greeting her guest rather than having Audra's arrival announced to her. Her hair was impeccably swept up, and her earrings had the hard glitter of diamonds, yet the hand she extended for Audra to shake was strong and not soft. Those were calluses that Audra could feel. The high cheekbones, over which the dark eyes were almost interrogatively tilted, lent her face a severity that had Audra thinking supper could be one long examination of all that she had yet to accomplish in the two months she had lived in Sweetwater. She tried not to look as though she were looking for Myka, but she was. Myka would have even more reason to be impatient with her, perhaps even question her judgement in selecting someone as untried as Audra Clarke for the job, but, if Audra were honest with herself, she still found Helena Wells intimidating.

"Myka's overseeing some changes we're instituting at the _Clarion_ , but she should be out here next week." Suddenly those high cheekbones were pleating, a wide smile undercutting the air of authority. "You'll have to make do with me, but I haven't forgotten how a paper is run. I've been taking great interest in the battle you've been waging with the reactionary forces." The smile acquired a sardonic slant. "Otherwise known as the 'good folks' of Sweetwater."

Audra tried not to stare at the parlor and the library, not to mention the sweeping staircase, that they passed as Helena led her into the dining room. This house wasn't as grand as Helena and Myka's home in New York, but it was grander than Audra had ever imagined she would see in Sweetwater. The parlor wasn't oppressively furnished with pieces in dark, heavy wood; instead, there were just a few chairs and a delicate loveseat, their upholstery neither too plush nor too plumped but invitingly soft. The library, what she could see of it, had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a long and deep sofa. The dining room was no less imposing, the tablecloth as virginally white as the lace on Helena's dress and the polished silver as bright as her earrings. Audra fast ran out of names and purposes for all the dishes and silverware that had been placed with geometric precision in front of each chair. Helena took the chair at the head of the table and motioned to Audra to take the chair to her right.

Audra expected Mrs. Erickson, maybe even a serving girl, to come into the room from the kitchen because, while Sweetwater didn't look like the kind of place that suggested serving girls and valets and footmen would have ready employment, Helena Wells's house did. Yet the door to the kitchen didn't open, and Helena, rising from her chair to lift a lid from a serving dish, invited Audra to hand her her plate. She filled it with slices of marinated beef, the sharp tang greeting Audra's nose, not unpleasantly, and cold boiled potatoes sprinkled with herbs. As if she had divined Audra's thoughts, Helena asked, "You wouldn't know of any girls looking for work, would you? I want to find one to assist Dorothy, Mrs. Erickson, this summer as Myka and I will be doing more entertaining than we have in years past." She handed Audra's plate back to her, the sardonic smile reappearing. "It's far easier to bluster in an anonymous letter that those desiring an education will find a way to pay for their schooling elsewhere and to claim that the town will never support the expense of a new school than to express the same sentiments in front of your fellow citizens at, let's say, a formal dinner." She looked around the dining room, gazing appreciatively at its wallpaper and wainscoting, the high polish on its floor. As her glance swept up to the table and chairs, their elegance speaking to the craft, and money, that produced them, she said, "Sometimes a well-appointed house is as effective a weapon as a gun or knife – and it results in less bloodshed."

Audra was very carefully cutting her beef, equally divided between hoping she was using the right knife and fork and hoping that, if she wasn't, Helena wouldn't notice. "Do you mean to bludgeon the Burnses and the Wallaces and, for that matter, most of the town council with crystal and fine china?" She savored the coolness of the beef and potatoes, finding it more than a little ridiculous that her respite from the heat was in a meal she would normally eat warm. Perhaps she could start bathing in ice cream as well. She would have grinned at the thought except that an unbidden image flashed through her mind of Liesl squeezing ice cream from a cloth over the opened bodice of her dress, and Audra heard, as if from a distance, the clatter of her knife and fork falling to the floor.

"Only with condescension, darling. I wouldn't waste my china by breaking it over Pastor Wallace's head," Helena said dryly as Audra, flushed at the direction her thoughts had taken, searched for her silverware. Growing serious, she said, "I could have done more to make this town hospitable. I could have tried harder to make people want to settle here - and not just because they were too exhausted to press on." She paused, then said firmly, "I will do more, and if I have to shame every one of the town fathers into assisting me, I won't hesitate." Audra righted herself in her chair, knife and fork clutched in her hand, only to see an expression of malicious enjoyment cross Helena's face. "They'll have me harrying them from one side and, on the other, they'll have the goad of seeing Sweetwater's new public library being built brick by brick, courtesy of another rich reprobate whose presence they had to suffer, Henry Tremaine."

As Audra was about to use the knife and fork she had picked up from the floor, Helena raised an eyebrow and nodded at the untouched place setting a few inches from Audra's elbow. "Audra, I accept that etiquette, along with so much else, may be lacking in Sweetwater, but we have not come to such a pass that I will deny my guests the use of clean silverware." While Audra exchanged her knife and fork, Helena refilled her virtually untouched glass of wine. Helena's had been all but empty, which might account for the combative light in her eyes and the pugnacious jut of her chin. Audra could only be thankful that Helena hadn't invited any of the town council; she didn't have difficulties picturing her grabbing hold of the men by the lapels of their suit coats – or their ears – and demanding that they open their wallets and make real their commitment to civic virtue.

After taking a sip of wine, Helena said, "If we can't shake money out of the council for paving the main street, perhaps Claudia might be willing to support it, given her current passion for motor cars." She extended her foot, and on the top of the richly embroidered slipper (of a blue perfectly matched to her dress), Audra could see a thin layer of silt. "Not that Dorothy isn't an excellent housekeeper, but no one can keep up with the dust." Shuddering as she looked at the tip of her slipper, Helena said, "God knows what blows in with it. All the horses that go up and down the main street, the dogs . . . ." Her gaze became abstracted. "It's a hazard to our health when you think about it." Leaning forward, Helena suggested, "Perhaps Dr. Napier might be willing to talk up the benefits of having a brick street instead of a mud pit in the spring and a dust bowl in the summer. If he could be persuaded to provide his learned opinion in an article for the _Journal_ , even better." The abstracted gaze had given way to a look so sharp that Audra could almost believe it had drilled into her head. Helena would be witness to every one of her outings with Liam, able to view in unsparing detail each moment of their tentative courtship, if that was what it was. "Would you have the time to talk to him? I have a feeling he'll be more receptive to the idea if you were to ask him."

Was that the beginning of a coy smile at the corners of Helena's lips? Had the gossip reached all the way out to New York? "Dr. Napier is a gentleman. He'd find it hard to refuse a plea for his assistance," Audra replied, all too aware of the blush heating her cheeks.

"Especially from a young, attractive woman," Helena smoothly concurred.

Young, relatively so, Audra guessed, but attractive only because Sweetwater offered so little in the way of competition. Unmarried women in their prime childbearing years were at a premium. Audra figured she could have no teeth and a face full of warts and wens, and there would be some lonely farmer who would be willing to stand up with her in front of a minister. Her complexion was clear, her teeth sound, and her features, while they might be on the plain and uncompromising side, were acceptable. She met Helena's eyes, and she again had the feeling that Helena could see inside her mind. The smile that Helena's lips curved into was gentle rather than coy. "To thrive in this town, you'll need to use every advantage you have, Audra, and you have more than you think."

A public library and a paved main street weren't enough to satisfy Helena. After dinner, they drank coffee and brandy in her library, and while Audra examined the books filling every shelf of the bookshelves, Helena scribbled down ideas on a pad of her paper in her lap. They ranged from the inconsequential to the important, as Helena probably would have described them, but Audra described them, if only to herself, as ranging from practical to pie in the sky. Helena said each one aloud, as though she were weighing both its soundness and its chances for support, but she didn't fail to write a single idea down. A new building in Halliday befitting its post office, sidewalks for Meridian (even if they were only wood), gas lamps for Sweetwater's main street, a teachers' college, courses offered to farmers and ranchers (by said teachers' college) on the newest ideas of land management, a hospital. Audra almost dropped the book she was skimming when Helena mentioned improvements for Halliday and Meridian, noting "They're part of the _Journal_ 's family now."

It was yet another reminder of how she was failing to manage the paper and its business as Myka had envisioned, as Audra herself had dreamily envisioned on the train ride from New York. She had visited Halliday and Meridian all of once since she had arrived, meeting with the former editors of the _Free Press_ and _Pioneer News_ to discuss how the concerns, interests, and needs of the towns were best reflected in the _Journal_. The men had looked behind her for the _Journal_ 's real editor, and the realization that she was the one they would be working with had shortened the time they were willing to spend with her as well their replies about how the _Journal_ could serve their communities. They would take care of everything, they assured her, sending her advertisements, notices, and the occasional story to be published as circumstances warranted. If they needed to meet with a representative of the paper, they could always count on running into Hans Albrecht, who was either at the Donovan ranch, which was hardly a day's ride away, or working on farm machinery somewhere nearby. They had smiled and patted Audra on the shoulder as they might a child sent to beg them for a contribution to charity, and with those smiles and pats, they had dismissed her. She had let them, too overwhelmed by her responsibilities to assert her authority more forcefully and unsure that, if she did, it wouldn't undermine her the more. Another error to be remedied – when it was cooler.

Helena set aside her pad of paper. "Why don't you keep the book with you? You're always free to come here, regardless of where Myka and I might be globetrotting, to borrow as many books as you like. Think of it as a lending library until the real one is built." She glanced at the clock on the mantel. "Do you think it's too late to visit Liesl and the children? Myka would tell me to wait until tomorrow or the next day, but," she flashed an impish grin at Audra, "I can't buy a gift without wanting to give it the next instant."

The hauteur that characterized how Helena held herself, how she swept into a room, how she regarded her interlocutors disappeared in an instant with that grin. It gave her features a warmth and a charm that explained to Audra how a powerful man like Henry Tremaine could remain besotted with her and how a woman like Myka, whose own cool reserve would have prevented her from challenging Helena's, could have become entranced by her. "It's been impossible to sleep in this heat. They'll all be up and eager for a distraction."

She couldn't have said that Helena ran out of the library. It would have been undignified in that dress, and Audra wasn't sure that her skirts would have allowed it, but Helena had left the library at a speed very close to running, and Audra could hear the rapid thumping of feet on the stairs. She tucked the book under her arm, a Gissing novel, and decided to wait for Helena in the foyer. If she stayed in the library any longer, more books would end up tucked under her arm. A far-off door closed and Audra looked up toward the second floor, but the sounds were coming from the direction of the kitchen. Helena appeared at the head of the stairs, head cocked toward the hallway. "Dorothy must be back," she said. She held two bags filled with wrapped packages but extended one toward Audra. "You can play Santa Claus, too."

Audra met her halfway, taking the bag. Her gifts, had she money to buy them, would be clumsily wrapped . . . and far fewer in number. At the foot of the stairs they met Mrs. Erickson, her black dress streaked with dust, its skirt covered with straw. "Are you packed?" Helena asked.

Mrs. Erickson looked down at her dress and then at Helena. "I would say so," she said, with that hint of irony Audra had heard in her voice before. "However, the wagon put up a fierce resistance." As Helena nudged Audra to precede her to the door, Mrs. Erickson glanced at the bags they carried with the same soberness with which she had appraised her dress. "I'll have the supper dishes cleaned and your breakfast for tomorrow set out. If there's anything else . . . . ."

Helena shook her head. "I'll survive until Myka arrives, and if her cooking doesn't kill us both, you should see us when you return. Safe travels, Dorothy."

Audra tried to repress her curiosity about what mission Helena would be sending her housekeeper on, finding that, despite being the taller, Helena's stride was the quicker. Her longer legs gave her no advantage as Helena seemed determined to propel herself down the street rather than walk. As they neared the Rusty Spur, its light and noise virtually the only sign of life in Sweetwater at this time of the evening, Helena slowed, appearing to count the number of men in the saloon. With an odd little jerk of her head that might have been a nod of approval or a sign of her disappointment, Helena gripped her bag tighter and increased her pace. "Dorothy is taking supplies to the reservation," she said suddenly. "You think it's difficult to persuade the fine citizens of Sweetwater to invest in their future? Try to convince them that the people who lived here before the first farmer set a plow to the prairie deserve a future. Most of our 'leaders,'" she emphasized sarcastically, "are in the Spur tonight, happy to throw their money away at the poker tables, but let someone suggest spending a dollar for the benefit of another . . . " Helena let her words trail off. She was silent for a moment, then she said with a calmness that was too deliberate, as if she wanted to do nothing more than continue railing at the council's self-interest, "You should consider visiting the reservation. I think you would find it a . . . memorable . . . experience, and Dorothy would take you. She goes there quite often."

Audra hoped her sigh wasn't audible. She had a feeling that by the time Helena made her return migration to New York, her responsibilities would have increased tenfold. Not only did she have to learn how to manage a newspaper, she realized she would have to learn how to manage its co-publisher in all but name as well. When the passed the _Journal_ 's office, Helena didn't slow as she had in front of the Rusty Spur, but she looked over her shoulder at it, stumbling a little as she did, and Audra could only hope that whatever thoughts about it that were passing through Helena's mind were more positive than the ones that had preoccupied her outside the saloon. This time, however, Helena chose to keep them to herself. They turned into the parallel ruts that led away from the town and into the prairie, the houses lining either side in no uniform pattern, some practically set on top of the ruts and others set far back, as if asserting their superiority to their neighbors by the distance they maintained from them. Audra felt an unaccustomed surge of pride upon seeing the handsome outline of her own home, thinking how well built it was, how well situated it was, yet she felt just as keenly that it wasn't her house. It was hers to occupy only for as long as the woman beside her deemed her a worthy employee. Audra's feet were flat on the ground, but her toes were curling inside her shoes as though her next step would plunge her into an abyss. While she was aware that her mistakes had outstripped her successes, she wasn't ready to give up on the challenge presented by the _Journal_ , and she hoped that Helena's impatience to improve Sweetwater wouldn't extend to her persuading Myka to search for a new editor, one older, more experienced . . . more effective. Maybe buried deep among the gifts she was carrying was the gift of time. That's all she wanted of Helena and Myka, time.

"It's working out then?" Helena's question so startled her that Audra almost dropped her bag. "It does seem an ideal arrangement." With wry amusement she said, "Before she married the sheriff, Liesl kept house for Myka. I think Myka still looks back fondly on those days." Helena chuckled to herself, and Audra sensed a private joke.

"Yes," she said quietly, "it's working out fine." Audra didn't find her living situation with Liesl a source of amusement, and "fondness" was much too pale and an inaccurate a term to describe the flux of emotions that beset her even in her sleep. But she pushed those thoughts aside as she did her worries about the _Journal_ or, more truthfully, her place with it and climbed the porch steps with an appropriate display of eagerness. As she had predicted to Helena, Liesl and the boys were still up, the boys in their nightshirts playing at their mother's feet and Liesl listlessly paging through a magazine in the rocking chair. It was the boys' shouts that caused her to look up as Helena and Audra entered the parlor, and her eyes widened in surprise.

Will, calling out a name that only approximated Helena's – Audra counted at least three extra "L's" – rushed to her and wrapped his arms around her hips. "You've been gone too long," he said reproachfully.

With an affectionate smile, Helena smoothed his hair, agreeing softly, "I _have_ been gone too long."

Gus was less certain that he remembered Helena but he was no less excited by her presence, hopping up and down and shrieking, quieting only when Liesl picked him up, shifting his weight to better accommodate the obdurate thrust of her belly. She approached Helena with the alertness to trouble Audra recognized from her riding lessons, when Lotte was more inclined than usual to resist being saddled. However, she lingered in the embrace as Helena whispered in her ear and when she drew back, her eyes were wet. Even Gus began to frown and whimper. She set him down and he ran to join Will and ransack the bags. Helena, saying brightly, "Happier thoughts, we'll think happier thoughts. He would want it that way," was dramatically eyeing the size of Liesl's belly, an eyebrow arched in disbelief. "Are you giving birth to a child or a litter?"

"Girl, boy, puppy, I don't care, so long as it comes soon," Liesl said wearily. Gazing down at the boys who were tearing off the excessively beribboned wrapping, she said to them so mildly and with such exhaustion that it was more plea than admonishment, "You should thank your godmother for the presents before you start opening them."

"They're not all for Will and Gus. I brought some books for you as well, as many new detective stories as I could find."

Liesl shuffled toward the doorway. "Let me put on a kettle for tea, and I'm sure we have cookies or muffins . . . unless Audra ate them all." Despite the fatigue in her voice, the tone was teasing and her smile at Audra was quick and warm. Audra shrugged in abashed acknowledgment; she would pocket a muffin or two before leaving for the _Journal_ 's office in the morning, and she would pocket a few cookies – if that was what Liesl had baked – before going up to her room at night. She hadn't known until the Lattimers moved in that bread and pies baked at home didn't always harbor an ashy taste or that bread and pies didn't constitute the universe of baked goods. "Now you'll get to listen to something besides _The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_."

Helena's eyes flickered between them, but she made no comment. For no reason, except that Helena's glance seemed to suggest something an inch beyond Audra's ability to grasp it, she felt a blush climbing into her cheeks, and she said almost brusquely. "Liesl, please sit down. I can make tea, and I know where the rest of the cookies are. I didn't eat all of them." Most of them, but not all, she added silently. For once, Liesl didn't protest, following Audra and Helena into the kitchen and calling for Will and Gus to join her. Will sped ahead, nightshirt flapping at his calves. He carried a paintbox and pad of paper and declared to Helena that he was going to paint her a beautiful picture of Lotte. It was Audra's opinion that horses only ruined a picture, but her relationship with Will was still tenuous and, in any event, he wasn't painting the picture for her.

The old men of the town might watch the clouds and trace the patterns of the birds in the sky and predict that the heat would linger for weeks or end tomorrow, but Audra, observing how Will demanded to sit next to Helena at the table, believed then that the best predictor of when the heat would end was when Will would demand to sit next to her at the table or offer to draw her a picture. In other words, when hell froze over. As Audra lifted the kettle one-handed and settled it on the stove, Gus gabbled happily against her shoulder, clutching a doll dressed in cowboy chaps and a tiny bandanna. He didn't continue to view her as a stranger, but for Gus, there were no strangers, only people who had yet to pick him up when he held out his arms or give him treats. Unhesitatingly she kissed his head and he issued a happy shriek that caused Helena to turn her attention away from Will and tilt her head speculatively at the two of them. Her eyes had the same musing cast as they had had in the parlor when Liesl claimed that she would retire Sherlock Holmes in favor of new mysteries to read to her. But Helena said simply, "It looks like you've made a home here."

Those dark eyes saw too much. Helena was too shrewd, too quick for her, understanding what she herself could only sense. It was bad enough that Helena knew Sweetwater better than she ever would, but Helena appeared also to have figured something out that, to Audra, remained bafflingly opaque. As if she were aware of Audra's unease, Helena rose, saying, "I can make myself useful in a kitchen. Where are the plates and cups? I can get those out."

Audra bent to let Gus slide to the floor so he could trail after Helena as she circled the kitchen, collecting dishes and silverware. Of course on a night so warm that it felt like flannel against her skin, she would be trying to adjust the flame under the kettle, all for a few cups of tea that would have them blotting the sweat from their foreheads as they drank it. It was undeniable, however, that Liesl was the livelier for Helena's visit. Her face was too pale and drawn, fatigue scoring lines under her eyes, but she was laughing at Helena's juggling, unintentionally, a stack of plates and a basket of cookies baked yesterday (the symmetrical, unbroken, perfect ones had been delivered to the hotel). "Don't break the plates. They were part of the set of china that you and Myka gave us as a wedding present."

"I thought the design was interesting." Helena said set the plates and basket on the table. Her eyes tracing the vines and leaves that formed the intricate pattern, she said, with exasperated fondness, "Your husband cared only for the food that covered it. Whether the design was of flowers or gamboling elephants would have made little difference to him."

Liesl appeared to nod in agreement, although her response was a gentle defense. "He had a keener appreciation of the finer things, as you would call them, than he was willing to let on, especially in front of you. He acted like a gamboling," she hesitated over the word, then said it again, "yes, a gamboling elephant because he knew it irritated you."

Helena arranged cookies on plates for Will and Gus and sat Gus in a chair next to his mother. "He should have shown such subtlety when we played poker." She passed a plate and the basket of cookies to Liesl. "Next to Myka, he was the worst player I've ever seen. You, on the other hand . . . ." She looked from Liesl to Audra. "What should I get the boys to drink?"

"Water."

"It's in the icebox."

As their voices crossed, Helena's lips curled into a smile that was both amused and knowing. She looked down at the boys and straightened the shoulders of Gus's nightshirt. "I'm surprised there's ice left."

"There was a shipment earlier this week. Our block is half the size it was when we got it," Liesl said gloomily.

"The heat has to break sometime." Helena retrieved the pitcher from the icebox and poured the water into cups. Giving one to Will and placing the other within easy reach of Gus, she took her seat next to Will. "What kind of poker player is she?"

Liesl, who was nibbling half-heartedly at a cookie, turned to look at Audra. "I don't know, we haven't played. Some would think it's an unladylike pasttime, Helena."

"I doubt that Audra puts much store in being ladylike," Helena said approvingly.

The kettle steaming, Audra pretended to be attending to it, although she wasn't sure she could entirely blame the heat - of the stove, the kettle, the day - for the sweat suddenly beading her cheeks. She didn't look or feel like much of a lady right now. A lady looked like Helena did, impervious to the vagaries of the weather. By contrast, Audra felt riven through, by everything, but at the moment particularly by Liesl's gaze. There was something detached and speculative about that gaze as Liesl tried to determine whether Audra was the type to fold or bet the house, which had Audra thinking for the first time, ever she believed, that the kitchen was a very small room. The January blue of Liesl's eyes was harder and brighter as they observed her clumsily pouring the hot water into cups, in which dented tea balls held a a sparse collection of leaves. The sharpness made Liesl no less lovely but it lent her a remoteness that called to Audra's mind the pictures of winged goddesses and Valkyries in the fairy tale books that Liesl read to her children. The fancy faded, and Audra was once more looking at a woman, tired and nine-months pregnant, who was waiting for her tea.

They drank the tea and ate the cookies and talked of things having nothing to do with the _Journal_ or poker games. They talked about the trips Helena and Myka had taken, to Egypt to visit the pyramids and to Greece to visit the temples, and Audra marveled that she was sitting close enough to touch a woman who had, in turn, touched structures thousands of years old. She marveled the more when she learned that Liesl had also been to Greece "many years ago," but Liesl hadn't elaborated on how a farmer's daughter had had the opportunity, or the money, to visit Greece. They batted mosquitoes away from the lamp on the table and let the boys crawl sleepily onto their laps, Will in Helena's and Gus in Liesl's, and as the boys slept, their conversation had turned to Liesl's husband and how the boys were like him in their different ways.

"You were happy," Helena said, a statement that nonetheless held a question at its end.

"More than I thought I would be," Liesl said, lightly stroking Gus's cheek with the backs of her fingers.

"And yet," Helena suggested, her voice dropping so low that it almost became a whisper.

Liesl shook her head. "I have my sons, and I have her." She looked down at her belly. Gus's head was resting on it, as if he were not sleeping but listening to his little sister's – or brother's – murmurs.

Helena said nothing more, but in the restless glancing of her eyes around the room, Audra sensed her disagreement, and when her eyes found Audra that tiny knowing smile touched her lips and disappeared. She left not long afterward, insisting first on taking an only mildly protesting Will up to his and Gus's bedroom and settling him in his bed ("I was never able to do this with my own child," she had said to Liesl, "so you'll need to indulge me"). She took Gus from Liesl's arms and tucked him into bed as well. Declining Audra's offer to accompany her back to her house, Helena said, "I've always enjoyed walking the prairie at night. When we're apart like this, I look up at the stars and let myself believe that Myka is looking up at them at the same time." She straightened her shoulders, as if she were going to spend the rest of the night tackling the other tasks that awaited her. "If I come by the _Journal_ at nine, will that be convenient?"

What could she say except yes? Audra hoped her response sounded sincere, but she could feel a pressure, not yet sharp, at the base of her skull that always presaged a headache. Without thinking, she dug her fingers into the back of her neck once Helena left, hearing Liesl's wry laugh behind her. "She is exhausting, isn't she?"

I'll disappoint her. She'll take over the paper and run it the way she wants to. But Audra said none of this, only smiling wanly at Liesl. "I should clean up the kitchen."

"The kitchen can wait until tomorrow. You need your sleep." Liesl placed her hands on Audra's shoulders, and Audra realized she never tired of recognizing the unusual fact that Liesl was as tall as she was, those wondrously clear eyes on a level with hers. "Helena can be demanding, but she's also fair."

"You're her friend. I haven't earned that."

"I wasn't always. There was a time when . . . let me just say that she and I had good reason not to like each other." Liesl's brows knitted together in recollection. Audra saw the traces of an old hurt in her expression that the relaxing of the muscles in her forehead didn't also smooth away. "It was a long time ago, however, and she and I have realized that we're more alike in some ways than we liked to think." Audra found it difficult to imagine how Liesl, with her warmth and her desire to set others at ease, shared much of anything with the regal Helena Wells, but she knew virtually nothing of their history so she would take Liesl at her word. It did make her curious to learn more about their history, but that could wait. She needed whatever rest her stuffy bedroom and tangle of bedsheets would hold out to her.

She was tired enough that even standing this close to Liesl didn't disturb her, but it was best not to prolong the contact. They simultaneously stepped away from each other, and Liesl said, "Start saving your pennies, Audra. I believe we have poker games in our future." She looked intently at her for a moment. "You're not as easy to read as Pete was. I think Helena may be in for a surprise."

Audra remembered Helena's swift, piercing looks and knowing smiles. Liesl was wrong. Helena would know her hand before she laid her cards on the table. Sighing, because tomorrow morning and her appointment with Helena wasn't nearly distant enough, Audra turned toward the stairs, hoping she would fall asleep the minute she collapsed onto her bed but knowing she wouldn't.


	5. Chapter 5

Audra sat at her desk in the _Journal_ 's office, rereading the editorial she had written urging the paper's readers to reconsider taking some sort of civic approach to . . . . sewage. Whether it was to levy a city tax or importune their state representatives for funds, something needed to be done. It wasn't just the smell at the height of summer, although she was convinced she could smell every single outhouse in Sweetwater this morning, it was the potential hazard it presented to public health. Maybe it was the ever-present odor, which like sweat, flavored every meal and perfumed everything she wore down to the chemise and thin cotton drawers she put on of a morning, but it had become a common topic between her and Liam on their strolls through the town in the evening and occasional rides into the prairie. She couldn't remember discussing anything remotely bearing on sanitation with Frank, though she had often wished he would wash his shirts more frequently and more rigorously clean the dirt from his fingernails. She couldn't imagine Liam describing the settling ponds he wished the town would create for its waste to the delicate young women he must have courted back East. They would have crimsoned and begged him to discuss something more appropriate for walking with a lady under the stars. Instead she asked Liam how many ponds Sweetwater should build and how the citizens' waste would be transferred to them.

There they would sit in the buggy, she demurely sitting with her hands clasped on her knees while he tried to stretch his legs as he discussed the threat of diseases, especially cholera, raised by the proximity of the town's waste to the creek that, when it rained, was deep enough for children to wet their feet in, chasing tadpoles in the shallow pools. And not just the creek, there were small sloughs and springs that pockmarked the prairie all around Sweetwater, and the town was letting its residents build where they would, taking no interest whether the pit for a family's outhouse was being dug just feet away from a source of water. For the most part, the townspeople and businesses like the hotel and the Rusty Spur got their drinking water from wells, which were generally too deep to be contaminated, but Liam, as he wiped his forehead with a handkerchief that smelled, thankfully, of sun-warmed linen, worried about a single child contracting the disease and the infection spreading like a dust cloud over the town.

Frank would have long since drawn her into his lap, his hand with its grimy nails seeking to worm its way under her layers, but Audra found herself strangely indifferent to Liam's preference for discussing the best method for setting broken bones or the odds of Sweetwater seeing a cholera epidemic to pulling her into his lap. She put her pen down and stretched, noting with dismay that most of the ink had been transferred to her skin rather than the paper. She wouldn't have to worry about the pace of his wooing of her or how ill-matched a pair they might be, since he, like many in the town, had left early in the morning for a Fourth of July celebration at the Donovan ranch. It was also serving as a welcome home celebration for Helena and Myka, although, since the town, by and large, still didn't know what to make of Helena, the Fourth of July celebration would overshadow the smaller, more private one. However, Myka wasn't even here to enjoy it, delayed yet again by _Clarion_ business in New York.

Liesl had initially planned to go out to the ranch, but she had woken up unable to contemplate the ride, and looking at the wan face with its blue eyes clouded with fatigue and discomfort, Audra had had to agree that she was making the wiser decision. Hans had stopped by to eat breakfast with his sister and nephews before he left to join Claudia, and Liesl urged him to take Will with him. Will had romped around the kitchen in excitement, but upon learning that he would be the only Lattimer to be going, Gus staying at home with their mother, he had declared, with a dark look at Audra, that as the man of the house, he needed to stay home to protect his family. Audra was tempted to ask him if he needed help defending them from bears and cattle rustlers, but she knew he wouldn't respond well to her teasing. The boastfulness in his voice caused his mother to flash him a smile (a rare event these days) as she gave Audra a consoling pat on the shoulder.

Hans had turned to her, asking her if she was riding out with Dr. Napier. Audra had crumbled her roll, fully realizing only then that Liam's talk of attending the event hadn't included an invitation for her to accompany him. It hadn't struck her as odd or neglectful at the time since she hadn't given much thought to the celebration or with whom she would be attending it; she saw Helena almost every day as it was, and Liesl had appeared to assume that she would be going with her and Hans and the children. Blushing and hating the fact that she was blushing because it was an acknowledgment that there was something odd, even embarrassing, about Liam's not asking her, she had said, "He thought I would be going with all of you. Besides, he has plans to spend the afternoon fossil hunting with Mr. Jinks."

Liesl was slowly rising from her chair, intent on gathering the breakfast dishes. Audra circumvented her by stacking the boys' dishes onto her own plate and carrying them over to the counter. As slowly lowering herself back down, Liesl gave her a look that mingled relief, appreciation, and irritation, but her voice was mild, "That sounds like something you might be interested in."

When she blushed again, Audra was grateful that she could turn toward the counter and pretend to be rearranging the dishes into a better order. It had sounded fun, which made her retrospectively regret an invitation that, until now, it had never once crossed her mind to miss. New York's history as a port, a colony, a center of commerce was on display everywhere you cared to look, from the harbor crowded with ships to the streets that barely contained a restless sea to match – of people talking in different languages in a startling variety of dress, from day laborers in rough pants and workshirts to ladies in their fine dresses to Jewish schoolboys wearing yarmulkes. A visitor, let alone a native of the city, couldn't see the name Harlem or Stuyvesant without recalling that it had been a Dutch colony before it became an English one. Sweetwater had no comparable history; it hadn't been more than a few scattered farmhouses until the railroad arrived. Yet there was history here far exceeding that of colonial New York or of the Indian tribes that had roamed the island and crossed the Sound long before the first white men had stepped ashore. The tiny and not-so-tiny creatures that had made of every rock face a virtual sarcophagus attested to a time when this prairie had been an ocean and the first man, whether English or Indian or Chinese or Arab, a squiggly worm, or even less than that Liam maintained, floating on the surface.

"Maybe he'll take me fossil hunting some other time," Audra had said quietly, not caring whether she was heard above the clatter.

With a grimace of annoyance that might have been the baby moving or disapproval of Liam's leaving her to swelter in town, Liesl had countered, "There's no need to wait on Dr. Napier. After the baby's born, we'll go out to the ranch, and you and I will take the boys fossil hunting."

Hans had offered to saddle up Lotte so Audra could ride with him to the ranch, if she wanted to be part of the festivities. He had pronounced the last word carefully, separating each syllable, and Audra wondered whether its foreignness on his tongue was owed to the language or the dearth of pleasure in Sweetwater. She had declined, unable to explain to herself why other than that she had decided Liesl looked too tired to leave alone with the boys. There wasn't even the dubious assistance that could have been provided by Mary Jennings since she, too, was going to the celebration.

Hans would be close to the ranch by now, Audra surmised, glancing at the clock on the wall. Liesl had told her that it used to take the better part of a day to get to the Donovan ranch, but the winding cow trails and wagon tracks that people had used for years had been replaced by an honest-to-goodness road paid for by Claudia Donovan herself. It was nearly impassible after a hard rain and in the winter but on a hot, dry day like this, it cut down the length of the trip to a half-day, which remained interminably long, from Audra's point of view. But she was learning that the bone-rattling saved by cutting a wagon trip or horse ride by a few hours was no small blessing. Reflexively she rubbed her lower back. Although she wasn't very hungry, it was almost noon, and she could use the noon meal she didn't want as an excuse to check on Liesl.

She didn't realize until she left the stuffy confines of the _Journal_ 's office just how hot it was. Usually the dimness of the building's interior suggested a relief that it couldn't provide, but its dark airlessness was, today at least, a shield against the sun, which burned through her dress as if she had worn nothing more substantial than newsprint. The emptiness of the street and the closed doors of the neighboring businesses lent a strangely funereal aspect to the day; she half-expected to see a wagon draped in black crepe roll slowly toward the cemetery. It wasn't just the celebration hosted at the Donovan ranch that had lured people away. There was a revival, too. An itinerant preacher had set up a large tent in a farmer's field northwest of town, drawing ever larger crowds to his evening sermons. Although the pastors of Sweetwater's more established churches had offered only lukewarm support – Pastor Wallace, in fact, had ominously warned a meeting of the Missionary Aid Society that Audra had attended with Liam about "false prophets"—the preacher's popularity only continued to grow. Apparently, denunciations of their sinfulness and promises that they would suffer eternal hellfire justified in people's minds the heat and drought they had been enduring. If only they had been more obedient, more righteous, God might have sent them rain instead of dust. Despite the prayers being offered a few miles away, when she tipped her head back to look into the sky, she saw nothing more indicative of rain than the milky trails of clouds. As she crossed the patch of prairie between the _Journal_ 's office and the _Journal_ 's house, she didn't hear birdsong or the low, broken whistle of the wind. The only sound came from her, her shoes not so much flattening as crushing the grass, so brittle that it cracked like glass.

As Audra stepped onto the back porch, she turned her head to cast another glance at the sky. The thin, scudding lines of the clouds had turned its blue powdery, but at the horizon, the color was darker, the violet of a bruise. Maybe a summer storm was in the offing. Or not. So many times she had seen clouds mount on the horizon only to scatter and disappear. The quiet ended once she entered the kitchen. In the parlor, Bruno was barking and Gus was shrieking in counterpoint to the barks. A pan had fallen to the floor, and pastries, some partially eaten, others clawed, were strewn across it. The barking and shrieking had stopped at the bang of the screen door, and in the brief pause before they resumed, Audra heard Liesl say, weakly, "Be a good boy for Mama, Gus, be a good boy."

She hurried into the parlor and saw Liesl sitting on a chair, hunched over, her face wrinkling with pain. Gus, wearing only a pair of Will's old knickers taken in for his stubbier legs, was dancing around her, his shrieks becoming plaintive cries of "Mama sick? Mama sick?" Bruno, upon Audra's entrance, had run over to her, seeking a treat or some scratching behind his ears. Pushing his head away – he had caught the scent of the cookies she had carried in her pocket that morning – Audra knelt next to Liesl. Another spasm had caused Liesl's features to squeeze together all the tighter, and once it passed and her eyes were open, tears beaded the lashes. "My water broke," she said. "I tried to keep working, and for a while it was bearable . . . ."

"Liesl," Audra murmured in exasperation. "Where's Will?"

"I sent him over to the Hawthornes' house. Olive's not a midwife, but she has two little boys." Liesl summoned a weak smile. "She knows what happens." As Audra frowned at her, she said, "Do you deliver babies as well as newspapers?" To Audra's deepening frown, she said softly but admonishingly, "I didn't think so."

"You forget," Audra rose and tried to ease Liesl from the chair, "I'm the middle of 11, so a lot of Clarkes came after me. I know what happens, too. Besides, by the time I left New York, Nan had already had five of her own." Although she was as tall as Liesl, maybe even an inch taller, she didn't have the sturdy Albrecht frame. She could easily imagine some Albrecht forebear dressed in animal hides attacking Roman legions with his spear. They were of warrior stock, tall and big-boned and strong – and when pregnant, virtually impossible to move. Not with her weedy Clarke frame. If the Albrechts had been warriors, the Clarkes (or whatever the family name had once been) had been the conscripts, the laggards, ready to desert at the first opportune moment. She wasn't going to be able to get Liesl upstairs to her bedroom without her cooperation.

They crossed into the hallway and shuffled toward the kitchen, Liesl simultaneously leaning on her and resisting her support, lurching ahead a couple of steps only to stop and bend, helpless to move without Audra's shoulders and back to take her weight and Audra's arm around her waist to guide her. The back flew open and Will ran up to them, breathlessly announcing, "The Hawthornes aren't home. I went over to the Sunderlands, but I saw only their old granny. She was asleep. Then she woke up and yelled at me to go home." He crowded closer to his mother, nudging Gus aside, who went from clinging to Liesl's skirt to clinging to Audra's. "I'll help you, Mama. You don't need them."

"You can help me by taking your brother back into the parlor." Liesl bit her lip as another contraction shook her.

"Mama sick," Gus dolefully informed his brother.

"She's having a baby," Will corrected him. Looking at Audra defiantly, he said, "Daddy would be helping her if he was here."

"Will," Liesl said, "your father would be taking Gus –"

"Upstairs," Audra interjected. "He would be getting the bed ready and bringing towels from the linen closet. Can you boys do that for your mother?"

Will eyed his mother uncertainly, but Liesl was bending over once more, groaning softly. Audra, straining to keep Liesl upright, tried to stare him into submission. She was grateful that he interpreted his mother's involuntary bobbing of her head as a nod, because, after a timid touch of her hip, he pulled Gus away and dragged him into the kitchen. "Quit being a baby," he scolded him, "we've got another one coming."

"No one's here," Liesl said, small gasps breaking up her words. It was a lament, and if Audra had had any confidence in her ability to see Liesl through her delivery, she might have found it wounding. As it was, she felt like repeating it as a wail.

She had been a witness but little more to the births of her younger brothers and sisters. The screams and moans she had heard coming from her parents' bed and, later, when the moans had become more piteous, the bloody towels and rags she had seen her older sisters and the neighbor women carry out had been all the motivation she needed to escape the apartment for the streets; there was always a game of stickball or a group of girls playing Double Dutch. For the winter births, she had found a corner of the stairwell to crowd herself into, book in hand. The older she grew, the more assistance she was expected to provide in the unending delivery of Clarkes, but by then she was prowling the streets in the business district hawking newspapers or running errands for the reporters. She was only another pair of hands, and not very skillful ones at that, when it came to helping her siblings greet the world, while selling papers and keeping the reporters supplied with liquor ("writing juice") and cigars brought in money – and money was more valuable in Timothy Clarke's eyes than another baby.

By the time she was living with Nan and Jim, her avoidance of the "woman's lot," as her married sisters called it, was accepted by her family with a shrug and a wry "Someday this'll be you." There was always an article to chase when Nan's due date neared, except for the child who insisted on coming early, on a Sunday, when there had been no credible excuse that Audra could use to flee. She had been charged with keeping the children quiet and occupied while her other sisters stayed with Nan. Nan would say later that Eddie hadn't taken any longer than the rest of her children, but Audra could have sworn that Nan took to her bed shortly after nine in the morning and that Edward Timothy Pawlik didn't utter his first bawl of protest until seven at night. In addition to the moaning and grunting, there had been laughter, and Audra had caught Hettie and Alice playing cards while Nan and Ruth argued about whether girls or boys were more difficult to deliver. Eventually, however, there were the same screams and pained sobs, the same bloody towels, but Audra's less-than-sincere offers to take over for one of her sisters were routinely brushed aside. "You're needed out here," Alice had said, scratching at her forehead with bloodstained fingers. Jane had been more disdainful. "You've never been particularly helpful before. Why should we expect you to be helpful now?"

As she half-led, half-dragged Liesl through the kitchen and up the stairs, she thought she might have the opportunity to prove Jane, one of the most critical of the Clarke sisters, wrong. Or, when Liesl suddenly let out a groan and sank onto a step almost pulling Audra down on top of her, Audra though this might also be yet another instance when she proved Jane right. She knew nothing about how to help a woman through labor – occupying her other children with games or storybooks didn't count – and although her knowledge of how Liesl's baby came to be in the first place was on a sounder footing, Audra realized that she had no desire to be more intimately schooled in the mysteries of childbirth. There had been a time, thankfully brief, when she had feared she would learn, when her menses were late and she had woken every morning with the taste of pennies in her mouth, her stomach roiling. She wouldn't have been able to depend on Frank to spare her from shame; he had married, almost overnight, a woman who had had an equal claim on his sense of honor and obligation, imperfect as it was. He had married a shopkeeper's daughter to prevent the child she was seventh months' pregnant with from being born a bastard, yet, Audra had bitterly reflected, it wouldn't prevent her own child from being one. She had tried to console herself with the thought that the shame would only be temporary. She would lose her job at the _Banner_ , yes, but there was hardly a Clarke who could accuse of her loose morals, not with a straight face. Both Ruth and Nan had been unmistakably pregnant when they married their husbands, and a brother had decamped to Texas to avoid marrying the girl he had seduced. Their displeasure would lie in the fact that she would no longer have earnings to contribute to the always depleted family pot and, sooner than anyone would like, there would be another Clarke mouth to feed. When she had almost decided to tell Nan, she went to the washroom one morning to discover that the slight stickiness she had been feeling between her legs, and which she had glumly attributed to the poor washing her underclothes had gotten, was the blood covering her drawers. Her menses were heavier and more painful that time, the discharge bloodier than normal. Perhaps she had been with child, after all, or perhaps the "curse" was a curse for a reason. Whatever had been the cause, the result was that there wouldn't be another Clarke baby, not from her.

"Liesl," she said, pulling at Liesl's arm. "You can't give birth on the stairs."

"Why not?" Liesl wearily asked. "Women give birth in all sorts of places."

"Because we don't want the baby sliding out and bouncing down the steps like a bowling ball." Audra grinned at her, hoping to elicit a smile in return. What she received was a baleful stare, but Liesl began pushing herself up.

They lurched into Liesl's bedroom, which, though across the hall from the one Audra had taken for herself, Audra had carefully avoided surveying. The only privacy Liesl could be guaranteed was what she found in her bedroom, and Audra had no wish to deprive her of it. It was a larger room than the one she and the sheriff had shared in her former home, and the bed no longer dwarfed its surroundings. It looked small, especially in light of its near-term service as an operating theater. Will and Gus stood at one of its sides, a pile of towels and pillowcases and washcloths heaped in the middle of it. They raced to their mother as Audra gathered the linens and deposited them on top of the bureau. She folded down the thin quilt and sheet that lay over the mattress and waited as Liesl, after a kiss to each boy's head and a "It won't be long now" that would have expressed more confidence if she hadn't sounded so tired as she said it, shooed them out of the room.

"Put some of the towels in the center," she directed Audra as she began to unbutton her dress. "I don't want to bleed all over the bed."

Audra eyed the mattress, noting how yellow it looked under the sheet, but did as Liesl told her, spreading them out. She shook out a few more towels and laid them on top. Liesl had managed to tug her dress below her waist, but she wobbled as she tried to step out of it, and Audra rushed to support her as Liesl clumsily kicked herself free of the skirt. Without bothering to ask Audra to look away, she began untying the cloth corset that bound her breasts, and Liesl first moaned in relief and then winced as her breasts, heavy with milk and unsupported, swayed slightly under her chemise. The nipples looked large and swollen under the material, and Audra blushed, directing her eyes away from them. Liesl didn't seem to notice. Yet, down to her chemise and drawers, she hesitated, and a blush to match Audra's filled her cheeks. "I need to . . . ."

"Yes, yes, of course." Audra turned around, hearing the squeaking of the bedframe and the rustling of the sheets as Liesl got into bed. Something soft dropped to the floor, but she counted down from ten before she turned around. Liesl had pulled the sheet over her belly and her drawers were on the floor. Audra carefully picked up Liesl's clothes, folding them and putting them in a rocking chair that she didn't remember from Liesl's old bedroom. It made sense, now, to see it here. She would rock the baby to sleep or soothe herself with the rhythm of its movement as the baby nursed. Liesl was propping herself up, folding pillows and tucking them behind her back. "Do you want some water? Tea?" Nervously she approached the end of the bed and picked at the end of the sheet. "Should I push this up?"

Liesl shook her head. "Not yet. She's not quite ready." She looked keenly at Audra, and Audra feared that all her ineptness was on display. "A glass of water would be nice. Would you see to the boys? If you can get Will to play with his soldiers or to draw, something to occupy himself with, his brother will settle down, too." Her hands went up behind her head and her hair, darkened to brown in places where sweat had made it damp, fell to her shoulders. She looked both young and, in a way Audra wasn't sure she could define, older as well, with her hair long and loose and a pinkness to her face that had nothing to do with modesty or embarrassment and everything to do with the heat.

"Maybe a cool cloth?" As Liesl nodded, Audra asked abruptly, surprising herself, "How old are you?"

"Have I aged that much since you came to Sweetwater?" She worried her lip as another contraction shook her. "I turn 28 in October. How old are you?" She tried to smile, but her jaw muscles were clenched.

"Twenty-eight this past March." They were only a few months apart in age, but Liesl had already been married and widowed and was only hours away now from giving birth to her third child. A sheriff wife's and yet more than that. Audra remembered the books on her nightstand, not all of them detective stories, and the fact that she had visited cities whose existence seemed as fabulous as Ali-Baba's cave or Rapunzel's tower. Liesl wasn't young, _she_ was young, a girl, really, who, in many women's eyes, evaded a woman's responsibilities. Did Liesl see her that way?

"Will's birthday is in March. Maybe that's why the two of you are so stiff-necked around each other. Both so serious, so . . . . " Her voice faded, and she shifted under the sheet, discomfort scoring her brow.

As Liesl's eyes closed, Audra went downstairs, trying to walk quietly. It was hard. Everything squeaked or cracked or thumped in protest at having to bear her weight, the stairs, the floorboards. Even the air felt more resistant. When she entered the kitchen, she felt that she might be able to sieve it through cheesecloth. Glancing out the back door, Audra saw that the mottled blue of the horizon had changed colors, adding gray and green and leaving the sky looking less sore and bruised and more bilious. The Titans, or whatever gods the mythology books said lived above, had stopped fighting and were about to rain down a pestilence. The clouds were no longer contained at the horizon, they were spreading and building, and Audra recalled with unease the stories the old men traded outside the barbershop and the Rusty Spur of cyclones so big that they sucked up houses and barns whole before dashing them to the ground, leaving pieces behind no bigger than kindling. She tried to reassure herself that she could look out again in a few minutes and see the sky rinsed clean.

The boys were milling around the table; Will's face was puckered with worry while Gus was absorbed in planning his assault on a chair, lifting first one leg and then the other as he debated which foot to lead off with. Audra ended his decision by picking him up and sitting him on the chair that had the stack of catalogs that enable him to sit at, rather than below, the table. "I'll make dinner and then you'll play quietly, mind you, while I look after your mother." She had tried to sound firm but not stern. It was how Liesl talked to her sons, as though they were all in agreement, even Gus, on what was acceptable behavior and what wasn't, and she was just reminding them of the contract. Strangely enough, it seemed to work for the most part, but maybe Liesl's children were a higher order of being than Clarke children, who were managed from birth much like puppies. The strongest and smartest thrived, claiming their share of food and more and leaving their younger, weaker siblings to suffer the curses and kicks of Timothy Clarke.

"I'll look after Mama, too," Will said stubbornly.

"After you eat, we'll go back upstairs and see how she's doing." Audra was careful not to challenge him. "I know she'd like it if you helped me pick up the floor," she said cagily. "You know how she likes a clean kitchen."

As she swept, Will picked up the pan and set it on a counter. He began gathering the pastries from the floor, and Gus, sensing that he was being kept out of the fun, squirmed and fussed as a prelude to launching himself from the chair. Audra dropped her broom and hurried over to him, slipping her hands under his arms just as one of the catalogs was about shoot out from under him. Carrying him over to the cupboards, she searched for a package of crackers. Failing to open it with one hand, she bit off a corner of the paper with her teeth, which made Gus giggle. He took the cracker she offered him and then she resettled him on the chair. She didn't bother to replace the catalog. His chin cleared the top of the table and he could reach the small mound of crackers she shook out for him.

The glass of water. The cool cloth. The boys' dinner. Looking around the kitchen to see what else she had yet to do, Audra asked, "Where's Bruno?"

"He's under the porch. Storm's coming." Will was sweeping the floor with the broom Audra had dropped when she ran to catch Gus. The broom was bigger than he was, which meant that mainly what he was doing was redistributing the spilled flour into new patterns, but he was being cooperative, and Audra thought that was the greater necessity than a neatly swept floor. She restlessly walked to the sink to stare out the window. The clouds kept building higher and higher, streaming and curling at the top like steam pulsing from an engine. The layer immediately beneath was gray like steel and seemingly solid like steel, too, although she could seeing a rippling within, as if these clouds were bellows firing those above. The last layer was a bank of clouds so dark that they shone like polished stone when lightning flashed across them. Audra had seen illustrations of the Earth's history that cut it like a pie, the widest part corresponding to the oldest time when the fossils Liam was hunting with Mr. Jinks were living, breathing animals and the narrowest part, the tip, being her time, human time, when man was king. Not very king-like when you considered all the millions of years in which humans didn't exist. Small and insignificant, really. It was how she felt now, looking out at the sky. She and the boys and Liesl were the tiny tip, and looming as wide and high as she could see was the rest of the wedge, ready to crush them.

The sun continued to beat down on the house, the barn, Sweetwater, and the prairie beyond it, but not for long. Already the light was weaker, more slanting, as if the sun were bending backward and away from the clouds. If only, like Bruno, it could find a porch under which it could hunker. Lotte. In the mornings, Liesl or Will would let her out in a small patch of grass next to the barn that Hans had fenced in. Someone, _she_ would need to put Lotte back in the barn. Trying to lead that damnable horse was almost as dangerous as trying to ride her.

Dinner was a motley assortment of scraps of ham that Liesl had been saving for a soup, bread, spring onions, and strawberries. It was better than the crackers that Gus chewed into a mush and then dribbled onto the table, wasn't it? Audra put the ham and spring onions between the slices of bread for Will and cut them into bite-sized chunks for Gus. She quartered the strawberries and spooned them onto the plates as well. There were more strawberries than ham or onion or bread. As the boys ate, she carried a pail out to the pump; the coldest water was water freshly drawn. She worked the handle, turning her head between the house (in case the boys decided to erupt from the kitchen) and the approaching storm; gouts of water began sloshing into the pail, and when she thought there was enough water that, if Liesl drank it all, the pressure would force the baby out, she stopped.

After she wiped Gus's mouth clean of cracker mush and strawberry juice, she took the boys upstairs, Will carrying a glass of water for his mother as well as some wet cloths that she could apply to her forehead as a compress. It probably wasn't where she wanted the relief, but for a few moments, it would make the heat bearable. Part of Audra feared that they might find Liesl in the midst of delivering the baby, knees raised and spread, an infant emerging much like a sausage being shucked of its skin, while the other part of her was hoping that they would already find the baby nestled in Liesl's arms. But Liesl had hardly changed position, still propped against the pillows as if she were ready for a meal tray to be laid across her lap. The image of a woman leisurely awaiting breakfast in bed was belied by the fact that Liesl's eyes were so tightly closed that they could have been nailed shut and her breaths, light and shallow, were those of a woman in too much pain to breathe more deeply.

"Liesl," Audra said softly, "Liesl."

Will advanced with the water and the cloths while Liesl smiled wanly at him. She drank from the glass while Will tried to fix one of the cloths on her forehead, leaving the other to slap wetly onto the floor. One of his elbows knocked against Liesl's glass, sending water onto the sheet. But used to a young boy's clumsiness, she recovered by swinging the glass high and away while her other hand caught the cloth as it slipped down her nose. "We're taking care of you," Will said proudly, "me and Gus."

Audra, Gus clamped to her hip, reached over Will's head for the glass and set it on the nightstand. Liesl looked up at her gratefully then gently touched her son's face. "Helena liked your picture of Lotte so much that she wants one for Myka. Can you and Gus draw her another picture?" A distant but unmistakable rumble of thunder punctuated the silence. Her eyes flew up to Audra's. "Rain?"

"A storm, Mama," Will cut in enthusiastically. "A big, big storm is coming." He held out his arms, lifting one as high as he could above the other. Dissatisfied with the meanness of the scale, he squatted close to the floor and then leaped into the air, shouting, "The clouds are this high, Mama."

"How bad?" Liesl summoned a cheery smile for Will's efforts, but the question and the seriousness of her look were meant for Audra.

Audra tried to shrug, but Gus was squirming to get down. "It looks bad, but . . . . "

"You better take the boys to the cellar." She turned her attention back to her son. "Just for a little while. Until the storm passes. Can you be brave like your papa for Gus?" Will reluctantly nodded, though he seemed to shrink inside the overalls that a moment before had seemed too small for him, the legs ending inches above his ankles. "Wait outside for Audra. She'll take you." Gus had begun to cry, from frustration that she refused to set him down, Audra knew, not fear, but she didn't like the cellar any better than the boys did. It was large and well built, not like the crude holes dug into the ground that others called "cellars." Her cellar, well, the _Journal_ editor's cellar extended under the entire house, its stone walls thick and, so far, proof against moisture. But it was dark and quiet, fertile soil for half-remembered tales of ghosts and demons and, more prosaically, spiders. Many, many spiders. It was impossible to tell how many because the cellar was so dark. Whenever Audra had to go down into the cellar, she would frantically brush her sleeves and skirt once she returned to the main floor, trying to rid herself of any spiders that might have latched onto her for a ride. However, today was not the day to worry about spiders; she had larger worries, babies and cyclones.

When she lowered Gus to the floor, Will wordlessly took his hand and led him out of the room. Liesl worked herself down the pillows, throwing the sheet to the side. "Close the door," she said brusquely.

After a quiet word to the boys to stay close, Audra shut the door. Liesl wanted her help adjusting her shift or the sheets. She didn't know why the boys had to be sent out for that, but she wasn't going to object to the demands of a woman in labor. She had learned from Nan's shouted threats to box Alice's ears or to carve Ruth up "like a Christmas goose as soon as this damfool business is over with" not to –

"I want you to look and see how wide I've gotten," Liesl was saying. "I want to push, but I don't know if it's time yet. Please Audra." She had gathered her shift around her stomach, her legs flung out, heels digging into the bed as she tried lift her hips up for Audra to look at . . . all that. Not that she hadn't seen a woman's nether regions before. Dressing and undressing in front of each other with precious little privacy, she and her sisters could hardly avoid glimpses of flesh that had always seemed to her to resemble a mouth turned inside out, its soft pink recesses made visible. Yet she had never seen a woman's nether regions, nether mouth so baldly presented. Instinctively she looked away, retaining only a confused and confusing image of a blond mat of hair fringing an isthmus of skin, pink and red both, grooved deep. Then, before Liesl could repeat chidingly, "Audra," Audra braced herself to look again, this time with the detachment of a midwife or Liam. Still there came an exasperated "Audra" from Liesl and more – "You won't be able to see anything from over there. Come closer."

It was no different than peering into the printing press, Audra reassured herself. Yet it was different, of course. While she didn't have Hans's familiarity with the _Journal_ 's press, she had been around enough of them in her years with the _Banner_ and other papers to know what was causing one to shudder to a stop and another to skew the paper or type. She knew more about the workings of a press than she did a woman's body, even her own body. She couldn't deny that, intermixed with the embarrassment of studying the most intimate area of Liesl's body, was the fascinated realization that this was also how she looked. Where Liesl had valleys and ridges, she had them, too. The terrain of Liesl's nether regions was her terrain. The smell was familiar as well, heavy, dense, coppery, although the tang of Liesl's was more noticeable. Blood . . . and Audra saw it, so much larger than her own she didn't know how she had missed it. The opening was the width of her palm, maybe a little wider. There was a stain on the towel underneath, wet and growing larger. So this was what had so mesmerized Frank . . .this hole. He had never shown much interest in what surrounded it, complaining about how hairy she was and how fishy her smell. He had preferred to keep his hands on her legs and poke around with his bobbling member until he found the entry. She wondered if Liesl had more easily and more readily accommodated the sheriff than she had Frank. She had never felt "filled" as she had heard Nan once describe it; she had felt pinned.

Audra straightened, holding her thumb and forefinger apart. "You've opened about this much."

"Not enough, not yet," Liesl sighed. There was another rumble of thunder, loud and deep. "Now take the boys down to the cellar, please."

In the hallway, there was only Gus, sitting in the doorway of the bedroom he and his brother shared, contentedly playing with his toes. Audra swept him up in her arms and rushed downstairs, calling "Will! Will!" He wasn't in the kitchen, the parlor they commonly used, the dining room, or the front parlor that they hardly used at all. "Where's your brother?" She didn't expect Gus to answer. He rested in the crook of her arm, looking out, content to be held when he was whirled from room to room. He giggled and shouted, "Horsey!" "I'm not a horse," Audra objected, her rushed search of the house slowing as she recognized that Gus wasn't calling her a horse but telling her where Will had gone. She returned to the kitchen, scanning the backyard and the area around the barn. She had a partial view of the enclosure; the fence had been put up a month ago, but it already looked like it had been standing for years. Neither Lotte nor Will was in view.

In Will's affections, Lotte was second only to his mother. The self-appointed man of the house, he would want to protect her, to put her in her stall until the storm was over. He would have seen that the clouds had swallowed the prairie to the west of Sweetwater. The lightning strikes and near-constant rumbling of thunder would have prompted him to run to Lotte's enclosure. Even with the walls of the house to blunt its force, Audra could feel the wind pushing at the screen door, rattling it in its frame. Leaving Gus alone in the kitchen was to hazard a disaster equal to the storm, so, silently cursing horses and children's love for them, Audra charged up the stairs, Gus crowing with delight until she plopped him in the middle of his bed. Then he whimpered, "No, 'Owdie, no." Shutting the door behind her, Audra spun into the hall, ready to barrel down the stairs and into the yard. Liesl's anxious "Audra, what's wrong?" stopped her.

Craning her head into the room, Audra said as confidently as she could, "Nothing. Everything's fine."

Liesl had partially relaxed her legs, but her face was flushed, and Audra suspected she had been pushing, trying to hurry the baby along. "How bad is the storm?"

"It's still a ways off," Audra lied. "I'll be right back for Gus, and we'll get both boys tucked safe in the cellar." She smiled as broadly as she could. "Don't go having the baby without me."

"If only I could," Liesl groaned.

The back door swung wildly as Audra burst through it and ran toward the barn, her feet treading on and tearing the bottom of her skirt. The barn doors were open, the interior dark and empty. In addition to Liesl's stall, there were stalls for another horse or two or another horse and a milk cow. Unhappy with the milk they had been buying, Liesl had been talking of getting their own milk cow, courtesy of Claudia Donovan. In New York, milk came in bottles, horses, if they weren't pulling a wagon or cab, were rarely to be seen, and boys like Will were in school or, even more likely, apprenticing with other street urchins in the arts of petty theft and larceny. Rounding the corner of the barn, Audra stopped, mainly to catch her breath but also because, if you lived in New York, you rarely saw a sky like this - filled from top to bottom and end to end with black, surging clouds. If you believed in the cosmogony of the preachers, you might think it had been inverted, that hell was at the right hand of God and that paradise was buried in the center of the Earth. She couldn't make out Helena and Myka's house for the clouds that covered it. The wind whipped at her dress and drove the dust into her eyes.

Will was struggling to open the gate. Inside the enclosure Lotte was trotting along the fence, chuffing at the constraint it imposed. Lately the gate had been sticking, its post dragging and digging into the ground. Liesl had been nagging Hans to fix it, but Audra was grateful that he had been as lackadaisical about repairing it as he was about everything else that wasn't associated with Claudia or her experiments. Once Lotte spied a gap, she would bolt through it, and they would probably never see her again. Audra would regret only the expense, but she acknowledged that Liesl and the boys would miss the horse. "She'll run away." When Will didn't stop pulling at the gate, Audra grabbed the top and held it firm against Will's tugging, yelling above the wind, "Get her halter from the barn." Finally he turned toward her, and she shouted again, "Get her halter." As Will darted past her, maybe to the barn, maybe just away from her, Audra climbed the fence and half-stepped, half-leapt from the railing. Gracelessly landing, she put her hand down to keep herself from falling, realizing too late that her chances were 50-50 that it would land on a clump of horse dung instead of a clump of soil.

Lotte warily regarded her from across the enclosure, stamping and shaking her head. Her greeting was only slightly more ill-tempered than usual. Audra had learned how to put a bridle and saddle on her unassisted, but it was an onerous process at the best of times, involving pleas, threats, bribes of carrots and dried corn, and the avoidance of a lazy kick or two. She and Lotte didn't have time to play today. From literally bruising experiences in the past, Audra knew approaching Lotte with the determination to get the task over with – whether it was saddling her, riding her, or attending to her after the ride – usually met with failure. Liesl, who had formed a rapport with the horse, could with a few low-pitched, calmly spoken words win her obedience, but though she had tried, Audra had never found the right words or tone to sweet-talk Lotte into submitting to anything. She needed to transform Lotte's eye-rolling defiance into docility, which, on a normal day, would be the equivalent of converting the _Journal_ 's grumbling and argumentative readership into a harmonious force for social good, but on a day like this, with a storm of Biblical proportion bearing down on them, all but impossible. The horse was scared of the wind, the lightning, and the thunder, and Audra was helpless to make them go away. She tried to talk softly and encouragingly, but her words, reduced to "Lotte" and "please," barely rose above the sound of the wind. She tried to approach the horse with confidence, only to have the blinding flash of lightning and the following crack of thunder send Lotte racing in fright around the enclosure.

"She doesn't like you," Will shouted to her. He had climbed the gate and was holding the halter out to her. From the satisfaction he took in the declaration, it was clear he wasn't speaking only for Lotte. But he had listened to her, he had gone into the barn for the halter, so there was a way to bend the will of someone who begrudged your presence. Will wanted to help Lotte more than he wanted to resist her. Audra needed only to divine what a horse most wanted. She crossed the mix of churned dung and dirt, fat drops of raining stinging her exposed skin. Soon the ground would become a sludge that would stain her shoes and skirt – and she would still be trying to get the damn horse into the barn. She grunted a thanks to Will as she took the halter from his outstretched hand. "Sometimes Mama sings to her. She says it calms Lotte down."

Audra stared at him, then she stared at the halter. A simple arrangement of rope and leather that any competent rider could slip over a horse's head. If Hans or Liesl had been with her, Lotte would have already been in her stall. Short of wrestling the horse to the ground, she had no other ideas of how to get the halter on her. Trudging toward Lotte, the raindrops becoming more numerous though no less stinging, she began to sing. She was no Jenny Lind, but she could carry a tune. She sang lullabies, nursery rhymes, _The Star-Spangled Banner_ (slowly and without shrieking "the rocket's red glare"), Christmas carols, and the drinking songs and risqué ditties that the reporters belted out in their cups. When she ran out of the songs she knew, she almost gave in to the desire to sing threats of sending Lotte to the glue factory but Will's serious face – he was keeping pace with her outside the fence – stopped her from putting the words to a melody. Instead she sang her ideas for editorials and names for the baby, and Lotte stopped her trotting long enough, her chuffing turned into nickering that sought reassurance, for Audra to slip the halter over her head. Lotte tensed and lifted her back legs in turn as if considering a kick, but Audra hastily launched into the _Battle Hymn of the Republic_ , her lips close to Lotte's neck. Only as she was leading Lotte out of the enclosure did she let herself look at the sky. She could barely see the _Journal_ 's office for the darkness, but just above the building, she saw the clouds begin to descend in a spinning motion, like the old-timers had described it.

Will was walking on the other side of Lotte, rain dripping from his hair and nose. Trying to keep her voice even, Audra said, "You need to run to the house and take Gus to the cellar. Hurry now."

"We've got to dry Lotte off and brush her down," he objected.

"I'll do that." Will remained by Lotte's side. "Go, Will, now." He stuck out his jaw. "Do as I say," Audra said loudly, "and go find your brother. I left him in your bedroom."

"You're not Mama," Will shouted back, his eyes, bright like Liesl's, blazing like hers could, too. "And I'm man of the house, not you."

She could continue to yell at him and let the cyclone suck the both of them, no, the three of them up into the clouds. "If your father was here, what would he do? Would he stand here arguing with me, or would go take care of Gus? Your brother isn't as old or big as you are, Will, and your mother is giving birth to your sister. Would your father want you worrying about Lotte or taking care of your little brother?" The wind was gaining strength, blowing her hair free of its knot, which had become a sodden mass, and whipping it against her face. Her skirt was billowing, and Lotte was growing restive, tugging at the lead. "Your father always looked out for the ones who were too young or too weak to look out for themselves. What would he tell you to do?"

After another resentful glare at her, Will started running to the house, the wind strong enough to push him out of his path. He flailed for a second or two, then bowed his head and doggedly pressed forward, his knees working as violently but his steps shorter and slower. Lotte took Audra's inattention as an opportunity to try to wrest the lead from her hands and turn in the direction the wind was blowing. Feeling the lead slipping through her hand, Audra yanked on it, barking "Lotte," and towed her, like the horse was a balky sledge, to the barn. Wet, the wind keening in her ears, not daring to look up to see if the cyclone was headed her way, Audra tried not to think about how frantic Liesl might be, especially if Gus had started crying. In fact, she tried not to think much at all. She was terrified, she could feel her stomach trying to crawl up her throat and if she wasn't having to use her legs to pull Lotte into the barn, they would probably be collapsing under her. Concentrating on what she had to do helped keep the terror at bay. First was getting Lotte into her stall, second was making her way back to the house, third was ensuring the boys were safe in the cellar, and fourth was confirming that Liesl hadn't yet given birth to the baby. These were tasks, these were things she could do; the fact that a cyclone might flatten the barn on her or that Liesl could be bleeding to death were things . . . she wouldn't think about.

Whatever sense it was that told a horse her dark, dry, safe stall was near was also convincing Lotte to become the obedient horse she never was around Audra. Instead of resisting, she was trotting smartly, eagerly into the barn, leaving Audra to clumsily catch up. Throwing a blanket over her in lieu of the brushing she had promised Will, Audra shut the stall door and ran out the barn's entrance. Risking a glance over her shoulder, fully aware that she might trip and sprawl face first in the mud as a result, Audra saw that the funnel above the _Journal_ 's office had disappeared. However, across the street from the _Journal_ and beyond the train station, she saw more clouds grow tails, like rats', she thought distractedly, long and dark and curling. Picking up her skirt, she urged herself to go faster.

Staggering into the kitchen, she weakly called out, "Will?" Her chest burning, Audra couldn't stand straight. The pain was bearable only if she remained bent to the floor. She waited until the ragged sound of her breath began to smooth. "Will?" It came out stronger this time.

"We're here," Liesl said, from much too close. Her heart resuming its gallop, Audra crept to the stairwell. At the top, Liesl swayed, the front of her shift streaked with blood. Her hands were on the shoulders of Will and Gus, a step below her.

Liesl wasn't tossing her head or rolling her eyes, but something in the set of her face strongly reminded Audra of Lotte, and she climbed the stairs far more slowly than she had intended, speaking as soothingly as she could. "I'll take the children to the cellar, Liesl. Go back to bed."

Liesl shook her head. "You'll take the children and you'll stay there." Her eyes seemed twice their normal size, as if she had seen all that Audra had seen of the storm and more. "I'll be fine."

Audra was close enough to the boys that she could pick Gus up. She settled him on her hip and reached out for Will's hand. To her surprise, he let her hold it. "I'll settle them down in the cellar, but the storm's almost over." She smiled as convincingly as she could. "Go back to bed, and we'll have the newest Lattimer out to greet the sun before you know it." Even more softly, she said, "Liesl, you're bleeding. You need to get off your feet."

She started down the stairs, resisting the impulse to snatch Will up, hold him against her other hip, and run for the cellar. Her legs were feeling wobbly again, and she took refuge in silently repeating 'Get the boys down to the cellar, then worry.' Her mother hadn't died during childbirth; Rose Clarke had died six months later, after a bout of pneumonia. Audra had only a dim memory of her mother's coughing and an unshaven old man in a rusty suit, smelling strongly of liquor, coming in and out of the bedroom. Yet she recognized the fear as the same. Different from her fear about the storm and its cyclones, which was sharp and immediate, akin to the pain of Will's nails digging into her hand, it was older, ghostly, but it had the power to make her sink to the floor. If she let it.

The door to the steps leading to the cellar was in the room in which Liesl did the washing. A lantern and a box of matches were on the shelf above the tubs, and Audra released Will's hand only to tuck Gus's into it into once she set him down. She lit the lantern, urging the boys to take the steps carefully. They picked their way down the stairs, Audra waiting for Gus to navigate each step. She hung the lantern on the wall and promised the boys that it wouldn't be for long. "I'll come to get you as soon as I can."

Will shivered. The cellar's chill would make his wet overalls all the more miserable. Audra scanned the room for anything he might use as a towel. In the corner a sheet had been thrown over a few pieces of broken furniture that Jonas Simcoe or his sister had left behind. Perhaps she would feed the splintered chairs into the boiler in the winter, but she could make use of the sheet now. She whipped it off the furniture and wrapped it around him. Will accepted her attention unprotestingly. "Will my mama be all right?"

Audra tipped his chin, so she could meet his eyes. "I'll be looking out for her while you're looking out for Gus." His gaze wasn't any the less anxious for her reassurance. "You're the man of the house, remember?"

She tried to ignore the pang she felt as she closed the door on the boys' upturned faces. They were frightened but they were safe. Safe, safe, safe, another word she could chant to keep herself calm. She took the stairs to the second floor two at a time, relief cascading through her when she saw there was no bloody trail she had to follow to Liesl's bedroom. The wind was noisier up here; it whistled and it shrieked, finding every gap and crack and shaking the walls. Liesl was in her bed, grunting and straining, and Audra, with no shyness and only a bright, determined "Let's see how far along you are," pushed the shift up at Liesl's nod of acknowledgment, resolutely ignoring the blood on the inside of her thighs and the spreading stain on the towel. There was no wonder, no curiosity, except at how much larger Liesl was now and how, even so, the baby would find it wide enough to pass through.

"I'm here. The boys are safe. Whatever you need, just tell me."

Liesl emitted a groan, bearing down on her hips. "I need you," she sucked in a breath between her teeth, "to go down to the cellar and stay with them."

"The storm's almost passed over." Audra gestured nonchalantly at the walls only to have a gust of wind violently rattle the windows in their frames.

"Liar." But Liesl didn't object when Audra sat down next to her and held her hand. "You're a mess." Audra's free hand went up to her hair. She would spend hours trying to comb the knots out. The hand that held Liesl's was crushed as Liesl suffered another contraction. Audra couldn't say how long it went on, her hand being relinquished to throb and burn only to be grabbed and crushed again. The lash of rain against the windows dwindled to a sprinkle and the wind no longer threated to shake the house into matchsticks.

"See," she said triumphantly, grinning at Liesl, "I told you it was almost over."

Liesl didn't look reassured. In fact, she twisted her head against the pillows, as if she were listening to something beyond Audra's hearing. "Run, Audra, run to the cellar." As Audra stared at her, mystified, Liesl said, " _Tu was ich der sage. Lauf_!" She bit the last word off with a low, wrenching groan.

"I don't know what you just said, but I'm not going anywhere." She realized that she was beginning to sympathize with Will, wanting only to help and having an adult bark commands at her. What the hell was going on?

Then she heard it, a train whistle, and she wondered what unfortunate engineer had the responsibility of getting his cars across this part of the prairie safely today. The whistle grew louder, as if the train had inexplicably jumped the tracks and was headed in their direction. Liesl released her hand and tried, weakly, to push her off the bed. "Don't be a fool, Audra. You still have time." Finally she understood; somewhere, very close by, a cloud hadn't stopped spiraling until it touched the ground. She wasn't listening to a train. She was listening to a cyclone.

She raised Liesl's hand to her lips, saying steadily, wryly over knuckles reddened from squeezing hers, "I didn't travel halfway across the country to die in a cyclone. I came to this godforsaken place to run a newspaper and a big gust of wind isn't going to stop me."

"It's a very powerful gust of wind."

"We call them breezes in New York." She attempted a cocky grin. "Until you've lived through a nor'easter, you don't know storms." Trying not to flinch as the roaring grew louder, she said, looking unblinkingly into Liesl's eyes, "We're going to be just fine, you and me, and won't you have a story to tell your little girl someday?"

Liesl seemed to nod, but her head jerked dramatically down and her legs jackknifed up. Her scream was lost in the shrieking of the wind, and Audra could feel the house lift, straining against every nail and bolt. She wondered if it broke from its foundation as it threatened to do, whether she and Liesl would see the boys still together, still safe in the cellar below them. As the roar of the train accelerated and filled the room, not with the acrid smell of burning coal but with the smell of wet earth, Audra curled around Liesl and drew her into her chest. What protection she could provide was woeful, but if she could bat away a few pieces of falling roof, she would. It was about as much heroism as a Clarke could hope to aspire to. The house shuddered and Liesl shuddered, and though Audra couldn't hear her cries, her ears battered by the sound of the wind, she felt them beneath her ribs. Her eyes closing, she remembered the times she had stood near the tracks, feeling the surge and pressure of the wind, almost strong enough to suck her into the churning wheels, as first the engine and then the swaying, clanking cars rushed past her. Almost strong enough to sweep her along, but only almost, because her feet had remained firmly on the platform, and she had watched the cars become smaller in the distance, the long line becoming a short line becoming a dot that she might put her finger over and rub from view.

Almost strong enough. She and Liesl were still in her bed, the roof still over their heads, the house still on its foundation. The train had rushed past them. The track that the cyclone had followed might have been only feet away, but they had remained on the platform. There had been a platform left for them to stand on.

It was after having been passed by, left on the platform more than a little windblown and with her ears ringing but intact, arms and legs and head attached, that the confusion truly began. Somewhere in the midst of checking in on the boys – Liesl urging her to make sure that the winds hadn't managed to snatch Will and Gus out from under them even as the newest Lattimer was on the verge of making an appearance – sitting them down at the table and plying them with cookies and crackers (hoping that food might be consolation for both the cellar and their mother's cries), looking out the windows several times to confirm that the neighbors' houses and the barn had survived as well, pulling more towels to soak up the blood and matter that didn't seem to sanctify so much as grimly underscore the toil and mess of childbirth, Liesl's daughter was born. Later Audra would insist that Liesl had shown the flexibility of a circus performer, bending over to pull the baby out herself, but if that were true, it became much harder to explain how her hands had become so blood-stained and why she had emptied half a bottle of homemade schnapps over a kitchen knife, which a few seconds later was used to crudely cut the umbilical cord. ("It was the good schnapps, too," Liesl would add in a dramatically mournful voice.)

Perhaps it was the descent of another kind of storm on the house, of Hawthornes and Sunderlands, men and women, young and old, Granny Sunderland among them loudly maintaining that she had slept through all of it, that led Audra to think greater chaos reigned now than when she had been alone with two frightened children and a woman about to give birth. Will and Gus, both in clean clothes, chased Bruno and the chickens around the yard joined by the Hawthorne and Sunderland children. Olive Hawthorne and the Sunderland women (three of them and as alike as bowling pins, Audra thought) had taken over Liesl's care, as efficiently and effectively shooing her away as her own sisters might have done). Granny Sunderland had declared herself too old to be of any help, searching out the most comfortable chair in the parlor and settling herself in it with the other bottle of schnapps from the cupboard. She would announce to anyone who entered the room that "I've done my bit. Now my children are grown and raising their own children. I've earned my rest."

The Hawthorne and Sunderland men were congregated in the yard, kicking aside the chickens, as they marveled at the near miss. The cyclone had touched down behind the _Journal_ 's office and the other businesses and houses grouped at the eastern edge of town and torn up the prairie in a crisply diagonal line that skirted her home and her neighbors' but ravaged every tree in its path. The sun had returned, but it was riding the horizon. Audra knew that this late in the evening it could be no higher and no stronger than it was, but she could easily believe that it, too, had shared in the exhaustion of the day. She knew she should appreciate her neighbors' assistance more than she did. They had been generous not only with their willingness to take care of all that she had left half-done, or not done at all, but with their food as well, piling the kitchen table high with what remained of the picnic lunches they had taken with them to the revival. There had been no need for her to fix plates for the boys; the oldest of the Hawthorne girls saw to it that the boys were fed and Liesl was sleeping, so Olive told her, sampling the offerings before she hurried back up to the second floor, not inviting Audra to come with her.

Audra felt strangely awkward about insisting that she wanted to see for herself how Liesl and the baby were doing. She had no recognized relationship to Liesl; they weren't related by blood or marriage. They shared a home, and that would come to end if either one of them married or she left the _Journal_ (whether by choice or Myka's decision). Yet she couldn't argue into submission a faint resentment that she had been displaced, not just physically – sometimes there were so many Hawthornes and Sunderlands in the house at one time that she felt she could breathe only the porch, and even there she found a Hawthorne youth sneaking kisses from a Sunderland girl in the glider – but in a way that prompted thoughts that she should barge into Liesl's room and order them all home. She had kept the boys safe and delivered Liesl's baby with no help from any of these women. Possessed by a growing irritation, she would eye the door to the stairs until reason asserted itself. If she were Liesl, who would she rather have looking after her and her baby, a mother or a single woman who felt more comfortable with the mysteries of a printing press?

So she uncomplainingly accepted the dirtied towels and sheets and Liesl's shift and put them in the washing tubs. When Olive asked her to draw and heat water so Liesl and the baby could be bathed, she did that uncomplainingly too. The Hawthorne girls were the ones to put Will and Gus to bed, and when Olive and the three Sunderland women who had been her assistants left for the evening, Olive firmly closed the door to Liesl's bedroom and as firmly said to her, "She's resting. No need to disturb her. I'll be back tomorrow morning to look in on her." The dishes washed, the food put away, the Hawthorne and Sunderland children chivvied home by the Hawthorne and Sunderland parents, there was little else for Audra to do but go to bed herself.

"Audra?"

It was oddly shy given the day's events and an intimacy that, regardless of its hard necessity, would be difficult for Audra to treat as simply that, an intimacy enforced by circumstance. She didn't have occasion to see a woman's body, especially one unrelated to her, without its layer of drawers and petticoats and corsets and chemises, and she had even less occasion to hold it next to her with the almost comical thought that she could protect it against a storm that had the power of a hundred train engines. She opened the door to Liesl's bedroom. The lamp on the nightstand was still lit and, though clearly tired, her skin more pale than fair and the blue eyes shadowed with smudges and half-circles that hadn't existed in the morning, Liesl seemed eager to be disturbed contrary to Olive's admonition. Her hair had been brushed, and it fell thickly over the lacing of her nightgown, a darker gold in the lamplight. The laces were only loosely draw, and Audra was visited by again by the memory of Liesl sitting at the kitchen table, the bodice of her dress unbuttoned, pressing a damp cloth between her breasts. She tilted her head, hoping it might slide back into the jumble of other memories best forgotten.

The baby was in no immediate need of a feeding, her eyes closed. She was cradled between Liesl's arm and chest, and she looked twice as big as when Audra had guided her out. Audra cautiously sat down on the end of the bed, and Liesl frowned, saying "You can't hold her from there."

Audra gingerly inched closer, until she was sitting on the edge of the bed, her hip warm against Liesl's thigh. The last time Audra had seen the baby, she had had no more than a fragmented picture of a face reddened by screaming and her mother's blood, the hair on her head black and oily with matter. One leg had been feebly testing its freedom by extending its foot into the air. Then Olive and the Sunderland women had taken the baby from her, and now she looked like this, rosy and at peace, for the moment, with the world she had found herself in. The hair that had been pasted flat to her skull with a skein of tissue was as soft and fine as a kitten's fur, and the baby suddenly yawned like one, too, as Liesl lifted her placed in her Audra's arms.

"She's beautiful," Audra said, because it was the compliment paid to any mother and because it was true. Her features were Liesl's in miniature, and Audra had no doubt that her eyes were as blue.

"I looked for you all evening. Every time someone came in the room, I hoped it was you. Where were you?"

"Doing what I thought would be most helpful," Audra said, lightly stroking the down on the baby's head. It was dark, but the hair that would replace it would be lighter. "Olive and the Sunderland sisters seemed to know what they were doing, and I had only been muddling along. You know that." She smiled and pretended to sniff the baby's stomach through the light blanket in which she was wrapped. "At least she doesn't smell like schnapps any longer."

Liesl responded with a smile, but there was a gravity in her look that made Audra want to duck her head or make a joke. "You kept my sons safe. You kept me safe. You gave me my daughter when I thought neither of us would survive the storm." Her smile widened lovingly as she directed it at her baby. "Olive couldn't have done more had she been here."

Audra rolled her shoulder, not enough to wake the baby but enough to signal that she wasn't entirely in agreement. She changed the subject. "What are you going to name her?"

"Jane, I suppose," Liesl said without enthusiasm.

Audra was no fan of "Jane," although she would admit that her feelings about her sister colored her feelings about the name. But resentment of a bossy, critical older sister aside, "Jane" was sturdy and plain – ill-befitting the woman this baby seemed destined to become. "What about naming her after your mother instead of your husband's mother?"

"No," Liesl said decisively, shaking her head. Softening the vehemence of her rejection, she explained, "Gertrud is a name you punish someone with."

"There's Greta, Gretel, Georgina, Grace, Griselda, Garnet -"

"Grace," Liesl interrupted. "It's prettier than Jane." Once more sobering, she said, "It's by the grace of God that we didn't get swept up by a tornado." Wincing she leaned forward and touched the baby's forehead, "I christen thee Grace," she said with mock solemnity. "It'll do until we get her properly christened."

"Why don't I give you back to your mother, Grace Lattimer?" Audra kissed the top of the baby's head and surrendered her to her mother.

"Maybe someday I'll return the favor," Liesl said slyly, "when you're struggling to come up with a name for your baby. I'll have to think about what works well with Napier."

"That's a long way off," Audra said. Impulsively she added, because it had been a day to dispense with polite evasion, "He has to kiss me first."

Liesl looked at her with surprise. "There's being a gentleman and then there's being slow."

"I told you, I didn't come out here looking for a husband." Audra started to rise from the bed. "You need your sleep."

"Would you mind staying with me for a little bit longer?" The request was frankly made, but Liesl wasn't so exhausted that she couldn't muster a blush. "I feel safer having you near."

With an excess of bumbling, which Audra preferred to think of as exaggerated care, she stretched out on the side of the bed that wasn't taken up by the baby and the blanket she was swaddled in. She had blown out the lamp, and she enjoyed listening to the sounds of the night and feeling the breeze coming through the windows. It was noticeably cool, and it held the promise, if not the actuality, of more rain. Maybe Grace had ushered in with her relief from the drought, and, if not, nothing was worse for hoping so. Maybe tomorrow they would wake up to rain, a steady, gentle shower instead of a downpour, and maybe Liam would return from fossil-hunting and gather her up in his arms with a passionate kiss. What did it say about her that she anticipated the former with more excitement than the latter? She thought Liesl had already gone to sleep when she heard her say drowsily, a smothered yawn dragging at her words, "You're very kissable, Audra." Perhaps Liesl wasn't the best judge of whether a man would find her kissable, but it made her smile all the same.


	6. Chapter 6

Grace's coming had brought changes, not only the changes that always attended a baby's arrival, the disrupted sleep, the vinegary smell of soiled diapers and gowns soaking and the smell of diapers and gowns needing to soak, the realization, still unfamiliar, that there was someone new in the house, but changes more subtle or at least beyond Audra's ability to articulate them. When her younger brothers and sisters had been born, and, to a certain degree, when Nan had started having children, Audra had felt a dislocation that was more than being physically pushed aside or forced out of rooms, of beds, of her chair at the table, although that had happened too. It was as though she didn't belong quite as much as she had before the next child came along. From the youngest of six she had fallen to the dismal, half-remembered, if remembered at all, six of 11. Then, living in her favorite sister's home, each young Pawlik in the cradle marked the rung she had just slipped in the ladder of Nan's affection. So she had assumed, without giving it too much thought, that, after Grace's birth, she would feel more keenly the knowledge that she wasn't a Lattimer, wasn't one of their family, and that their presence in this big house with its overabundance of rooms was truly only temporary until Liesl found a new husband or a better living situation.

Yet Grace's presence had only seemed to strengthen the tenuous bonds between them. Audra felt closer to the boys, especially Will, than she had before. He maintained a certain wariness around her still, but sometimes his looks were friendly rather than hostile, and he no longer avoided addressing her, calling her by her name or, more often, Gus's variant of it, Audie. Gus, equally curious about and resentful of his little sister, would seek to be petted by her when Grace claimed his mother's attention, loudly declaring his preference for 'Owdie' to help him dress or cut up his meat. Audra realized that he did it to provoke a response from Liesl, but she couldn't chide him when he turned a helpless face up to her.

She felt closer to Liesl as well, although their interactions, on the surface, seemed little changed. Liesl's smiles weren't brighter or her glances warmer, like Will's, and she was just as resolute about doing virtually all the work around the house in addition to her baking. There were no plaintive cries of "Owdie, come help" from her. Yet something was different between them all the same. Audra could see it reflected in the small upward curl of Helena's lips when she visited, which was practically every day now that there was a baby to hold and to amuse with nonsense words and wholly undignified expressions. Helena seemed too enraptured by the baby, Audra thought, to pay attention to what she and Liesl said to each other as they passed in the hall, but when she would enter the parlor with a cup of tea or to take Grace from Helena for a diaper check, there would be that tiny, knowing quirk of Helena's lips.

The quirk would be there and then it would be gone, and Audra would no more understand why it had disappeared than she understood why it had appeared in the first place. Liam was less mysterious about what he had divined, telling Audra as they sat together on the glider of an evening that Liesl "greatly depended" on her. "You're becoming a second mother to the boys," he had declared one night as the twilight deepened the shadows on the porch, giving them the illusion of privacy. He was taking more advantage of it now, not only drawing her into his arms and encouraging her to rest her head against his shoulder but kissing her too. Audra wasn't sure that Liesl would appreciate her being called a second mother, and she was certain that Liesl would adamantly reject the suggestion that she was dependent on her. Liam simply silenced her objections with a kiss.

The kisses were, like Liam himself, very gentlemanly. He never tried to grind his mouth against hers as Frank had, nor did he take her acceptance of his kisses as license to let his hands roam over her chest or under her skirt. His kisses were brief, almost shy, the tickle of his mustache leading her to imagine that this light, feathery brushing was what it would be like if a hummingbird were to flutter against her lips. He had been so abject in his apologies for not being able to assist during Grace's delivery that Audra sometimes thought his kisses were a penitence meant for Liesl. When she had asked him how he had enjoyed his fossil-hunting with Steve Jinks, Liam had blushed and muttered, "It doesn't seem nearly so enjoyable now that I know you and Mrs. Lattimer were alone during the storm." Liesl's loyal declaration that Audra was a fine nurse had only sharpened his self-rebuke. "A doctor worth his oath doesn't forget his duty to his patients to go look at old bones. They've been there for millennia, they could have a waited a day or two longer." Attempting to lighten his mood, Liam had added with a good humor that was more forced than real, "I promise I won't be seduced by some prehistoric sea urchin should you need me again." Inexplicably he had blushed saying it, stumbling over "seduced," while Liesl responded wryly, "I promise you that it won't be for the birth of another child."

Audra had looked at her in surprise. Liesl had sounded so certain, and Audra wondered, with a disappointment that had an unexpectedly sharp edge, if she had already decided that no one would ever measure up to her husband. Audra hadn't been looking forward to the time when Liesl, wanting a father for her children and, perhaps, a return to the status she had enjoyed as the sheriff's wife, would select the most suitable candidate and leave her to rattle around, alone, in a house built for a family. Candidates there would be when Liesl was ready to look for them, of that Audra had no doubt. What bachelor or widower wouldn't appreciate an excellent housekeeper and a superior cook? She was also intelligent, practical, and good-humored, a woman who would be as much a partner as a wife. What man, bachelor or widower or twenty years married, young or old or in-between, wouldn't want her? She was so lovely that Audra, happening upon her in the kitchen of a morning, would stop and let the loveliness, like sunshine, soak into her, the heat of the stove leaving Liesl's cheeks flushed and a hand, streaked with flour, distractedly pushing at the hair curling damply against her skin. Audra remembered with a clarity that unsettled her how Liesl, the day that Grace had been born, had drowsily called her "kissable" and how deeply Liesl had slept as she held her. A Clarke didn't usually waste time on thinking about what life might owe her or him – survival was gift enough – but Audra believed that Liesl deserved more happiness from life than she had found in her brief marriage, and it wasn't right that her beauty and warmth should exist in a widow's half-light.

So she would attempt to express that belief, but cautiously, because the sheriff had been in his grave for little more than six months and Liesl could fairly ask her what she knew about husbands and marriages to be giving her advice. Not much, since Frank Thornton and Liam Napier were the only serious suitors she had had, and the coarse treatment of her by the one and the excessively courtly treatment of her by the other had given her little insight into what a relationship between those two poles might be like. Yet one morning she lingered at the house later than she usually did, staying to have breakfast with the boys, hoping to find the courage to tell Liesl what she hoped for her. It wasn't a propitious morning, not only did she need to leave before the morning grew too late to meet Helena for a trip to Halliday but Liesl was busy as well, completing, with Mary's help, an order from the hotel for bread and rolls for the noon dinner. The bread had been baked the day before, but the rolls they were finishing this morning.

Cutting her slice of ham into the same small squares that she had cut Gus's into and which he was greedily pushing into his mouth with his fingers – she kept a watchful eye on him in case he started to choke – Audra asked, "Are you planning to go to the barn dance this Saturday?" She stopped cutting her ham to blot her forehead with her napkin. August was promising to be no less hot than July, and though Liesl had started baking before the sun rose to take advantage of what coolness the day held, the kitchen lacked only the devil and his pitchfork, Audra thought, to mark it as the outer boundary of hell.

"I promised to bring pies, so the children and I will be riding out with Helena and Myka." Liesl was placing a loaf of her rye bread, one of her most popular items, into the box that Mary would take to the hotel later in the morning. "Are you looking for a ride to the Jespersons' farm?" She frowned. "I thought you were going with Dr. Napier."

"He is, I mean, I'm going with him." Liesl's face cleared at the confirmation, and Audra felt a surprising tug of disappointment that Liesl so clearly supported the doctor's wooing of her. It was illogical. Most women would actively seek the approval of others when it came to suitors and, if friends and family members were willing, enlist their help in encouraging the likeliest prospect among the men paying court. Yet, although Liam's courtship of her was less than fervent, it was persistent in its quiet way. He didn't need Liesl's encouragement. "What I meant to ask," Audra tried again, "was whether you were going to dance and not take up a station behind the desserts. People can cut their own slices of pie. You deserve some fun."

"Maybe I'm a terrible dancer, and it's safer if I hide behind the desserts," Liesl said lightly. Audra doubted that was the case. Liesl probably danced as she did most things, with grace and little fuss. As Will stood on tiptoe to reach into the box of baked goods, Liesl tapped his hand. Ruffling his hair, she said, "If I decide to dance, I have two partners already. They're very handsome gentlemen, although one will likely make up his own steps to the music." She shot an amused glance at Gus, who, at the mention of dancing, had begun bouncing in his chair, threatening to send the catalogs that boosted him up to the table across the floor. After she murmured to Mary to check the pan of rolls that had been cooling, Liesl left the box to open the oven and peer into its interior, assessing the doneness of the cookies that were baking in it. "Are you worried that I'll become like the sisters Schieffer, measuring out punch and coffee so that everyone gets exactly half a cup and no more?"

The sisters Schieffer were two maiden ladies in their seventies who counted the number of times an attendee of a meeting of the Missionary Aid Society or similar gathering would leave in the middle of a lecture for a cup of coffee or a walk outside. Audra was positive that their lips moved as they counted, her certainty based on her own experience. She was never able to sit through a discussion of the items the missionaries in China or in the deserts of the Near East were in need of for the next few months without several trips to the refreshment table. "At Wednesday night's Bible study, you did sit with them." While Liesl had been sitting with the sisters near the refreshment table, Audra had been sitting with Liam, Grace in her basket next to them, the boys at home under the supervision of the Sunderland girls. While she was aware that most of the young, unmarried women would have cheerfully started brawling, in front of the minister, to win the opportunity to sit where she was sitting, Audra would just as cheerfully traded places with the boys.

"I'm feeling old before my time." Liesl pulled one of the baking sheets from the oven and set it on the range top. "A six-week-old baby who's more demanding than her brothers put together is responsible for that." She smiled at Audra. "I think I've seen a few gray hairs on your head." As they looked at each other, her smile grew warmer, and Audra felt that it was enclosing them in a space that only the two of them shared. Mary was asking a question about the rolls and how many they should try to fit into the box, but Liesl seemed not to hear her. "You must have walked with her for hours last night."

Grace was active, a reluctant sleeper, discontentedly moving whenever she was put down to rest. Sometimes Liesl said that the tornado must have left some of its force in her because Grace would fix her eyes upon her aimlessly moving arms and legs as if she would will them to grasp and hold and pull, to walk and jump and run. She hadn't stayed long in the cradle beside Liesl's bed before her cries and ceaseless movement of the cradle earned her her own room, and it was there that Audra, when her cries echoed through the house waking Will and Gus, would pick Grace up from her crib and walk with her, the motion soothing her. Liesl would stagger from bed and spell her, taking Grace into her own bedroom and nurse her, thinking that would quiet her, but Grace no more enjoyed feeding than she did sleeping and, more often than not, exhausting themselves before they exhausted her, Audra and Liesl would collapse together on one or the other's bed, Grace whimpering in frustration or, more rarely, gurgling and chuckling to herself between them as they slept.

They would wake up, discovering that they had used each other as a pillow, but Audra felt no embarrassment as Liesl removed her arm from underneath her head or, conversely, she removed her arm from underneath Liesl's head. She had spent most of her life sharing a bed with her sisters and, especially in the winter, they would sleep curled together like kittens. Yet there wasn't the elbowing and the poking and the crude joking about how Alice farted as she slept or how Hettie needed to wash better. Instead Liesl would smile a smile Audra would see only in those mornings, tender and fleeting, and the more tender it seemed, the more fleeting it was. Then, as if that first smile had been a false start, an experiment conducted to determine if the day were worth greeting, Liesl would scoop up Grace, a second smile, broad and loving, crinkling her eyes. There had never been any smiles like Liesl's first smile between Audra and her sisters, nor any smiles like Liesl's second one either, and Audra had had worse pillows than Liesl's arm or shoulder.

She had woken up with her head on Liesl's arm this morning, too. She had walked with Grace on endless circuits of the house the night before, even taking her outside and showing her the stars. Grace had waved her arm as if she wanted to pluck one from the sky and then, frustrated in that effort, had started crying again. Eventually Audra had returned Grace to her mother's arms and tumbled onto the unoccupied side of the bed, mumbling that she would go back to her own room "in just a minute."

"We went stargazing," she said, spreading a thick layer of the blackberry preserves that Liesl had canned last summer on the top half of a biscuit. She automatically did the same with the bottom half and gave it to Gus. Looking at the jar, Audra pictured a morning like this one, hot, a slight breeze coming through the screens at the windows and through the screen door, Liesl standing over a large, fragrantly smelling pot on the stove, which bubbled with the berries, fast liquefying, that she had picked a few days before. From behind, arms encircled her waist, and a head nestled against her neck. Liesl was chuckling, low in her throat, as if she were only now resuming an intimate conversation that she and the sheriff had had in their bed, except that the arms around Liesl's waist were slender for a man's and the head resting so familiarly against her neck had hair a shade of brown lighter than the sheriff's, a brown that looked red in the sunlight.

"What was that you were saying?" Audra said, starting so violently that she sent her knife to the floor, her coffee cup almost following it.

"I was asking you what the two of you wished for." At Audra's blank look, Liesl added, "On a star, you said you were stargazing."

Audra picked up the knife, distractedly cleaning it with the dishtowel that served as Gus's napkin, nothing smaller able to manage the messiness of his eating. "Owdie made a bobo," he said with a child's relish in the misadventure of an adult. His grin was purple, preserves smeared across his lips and cheeks.

"I wished that the sun would come up later, so we could sleep longer. Grace was probably wishing that she could ride one of the stars into space." Audra wiped Gus's face, noticing only then that he had managed to get the preserves on his eyelashes and brows. Giving him a stern look, she gently daubed at them, urging him to sit still. He whined, rubbing his fist into his eyes.

"Maybe Helena or Claudia will have built a spaceship by the time Grace is grown, although I'd prefer the 'magic' of a full night's sleep." Liesl reached for her coffee cup, frowning into it. "This has more flour than coffee." Shrugging, she drank from it. "If anything, the night felt shorter than usual."

"Probably because you had me and Grace both on your arms, weighing you down."

"I've had worse burdens," Liesl teased, her discontent about her coffee and her sleepless night vanishing.

Audra wanted to wriggle in the sun of Liesl's teasing, much like Bruno wriggled on the floor in pleasure when a sunbeam shone on him – or as he had before the summer sun drove him to spend the better part of the day under the porch. Unlike the sun, the warmth of Liesl's teasing worked from the inside out, Audra's responsiveness to it burning her cheeks with a blush. She wasn't sure why she blushed when Liesl showed her affection, maybe because the Clarkes were so unpracticed at it. Growing up, Audra had felt little difference between a blow on her shoulder prompted by a sudden rush of love and one prompted by anger. Both had had a tendency to make her stumble; only the absence of her name being shouted in outrage confirmed that the cuff was a loving one. With Liesl, there was no ambiguity about whether she was in a loving or an angry mood. The lambency of her eyes and expression would darken and her voice would grow rough. Then a blunt objection would follow and, if she were in high dudgeon, exclamations in German. Audra never needed a translator for those.

"What are you smiling about?" Liesl asked with mock suspicion.

Audra was about to say something foolish and, she sensed, potentially unwise. I can't decide whether I think you're lovelier when you're happy or when you're about to storm. She was saved by a knock at the screen door. If she weren't supposed to meet Helena at the _Journal_ 's office, she might think it was Helena here for her practically daily visit with Grace. Whoever it was, she hoped their visitor would be quiet; Grace was sleeping, and the rest Grace's sleeping afforded them was too precious to give up. Yet something in the way that Liesl went to the door, maybe no more than the fact that she stopped to untie her apron, which was stained with egg yolk and streaks of dough, told Audra that their visitor wasn't just anyone. It wasn't Olive or one of the Sunderlands – Liesl wouldn't have taken off her apron and they wouldn't have bothered knocking. This visitor was more timid or more polite, depending on how you looked at it, and Audra didn't need to hear Liesl's slightly flustered "Myka!" to know who it was.

Gus was climbing down from his chair to greet her and even Mary didn't try to find an excuse to vanish down to the cellar. Audra didn't move, except to return to her now cold ham and methodically spear the pieces she had cut. There were the rustling of skirts, the sounds of dishes being taken from a cupboard and coffee being poured, Mary's shy responses to Myka's greeting, and then the squeak of a chair as Myka joined Audra at the table.

Myka never wore her clothes with the same aplomb or flair as Helena, but they were no less expensive than Helena's and in colors and styles that flattered her, which Audra thought was more Helena's doing than Myka's. Myka wore her dresses with an indifference that Audra recognized as similar to her own, although Myka's indifference was literally garbed in the finest linen and silk, a world away from Audra's workaday muslin and twill. This morning Myka showed to special advantage in a green-patterned linen dress, her hair, less red and less wild than Audra's, neatly bound and pinned to her head. Her eyeglasses didn't detract from the sleekness of her appearance so much as give it a studious bent. Had Audra encountered her on a Manhattan sidewalk, she would have taken Myka for one of those ladies of privilege who spent their time in libraries and museums, writing poetry or tutoring themselves in Egyptian archeology, rather than in empty socializing. Liesl was fluttering around her, setting down a plate of pastries and asking her if she wanted cream; "fluttering" wasn't a word that Audra would ordinarily choose to describe Liesl. She was never more confident than when she was in a kitchen.

Audra poked at the bread next to the uneaten ham on her plate. The biscuits had been fresh, but the bread had been baked days before, and the cream in her coffee was the milk that Will had left at the bottom of his glass. Myka eyed her curiously, maybe even a little warily. She chose from her plate a slice of bread topped with cinnamon streusel. "I would've been the one going with you to Halliday today, but I'm going to Rapid City instead to add to our portfolio." She gave Audra a self-deprecating smile that couldn't quite hide an underlying pride. "The _Bulletin_ has been struggling, but we think we can turn it around."

Hearing Liesl's teasing yet supportive "Of course, you will. I remember the, what's the word, indefatigable, yes, the indefatigable editor I worked for," Audra found herself hoping that buying another newspaper would keep Myka occupied in Rapid City for some time to come. Myka was looking earnestly at her. "But my train doesn't leave until this afternoon, so if you need me to take care of something at the _Journal_ , I'll be happy to do it. A publisher should be able to pitch in at one of her papers."

Looking composed and elegant this morning, Myka also had to be nice. Audra pushed away her plate of cold ham, noticing a grease spot on her own very plain and all too serviceable dress. It was one of her better dresses, but its color and material were unremarkable next to Myka's, and now she couldn't even argue in its favor that it was clean. The bread that Myka was buttering was from a loaf that Liesl had considered too ill-formed to include with the others that Mary would take to the hotel, but when Audra had tried to sneak a bit of its topping, Liesl had moved the bread out of her reach and told her to eat the older bread in the breadbox. Myka got Liesl's rich, buttery streusel, she got the stale heels in the breadbox. "Nothing that can't wait until tomorrow," Audra said, hoping that the grumble at the back of her throat hadn't roughened her words. It wasn't Myka's fault, after all, that Liesl tended to needlessly straighten things, press treats upon her that she wouldn't eat, compliment her, and look the brighter for her presence.

"You won't be back until late then," Liesl said. "I'll save some dinner for you."

"And some torte." Liesl had made a torte filled with raspberries and blackberries that the boys had picked. If she could have gotten away with it, Audra would have had the torte as her dinner. "I won't be so late that I won't want to hear another Sherlock Holmes story," she added, sounding even to her own ears a little too insistent.

Liesl's expression turned curious. "If Grace gives us enough time . . . I think we're on to 'The Adventure of the _Gloria Scott_.'" And then the reassurance that there were moments and experiences the two of them shared that belonged to no one else, not even Myka, was blighted when Liesl turned to Myka with an appreciative smile and said, "If I've forgotten to thank you for giving us the _Memoirs_ , as well as all the other books, let me tell how much we're enjoying reading it."

"I missed everything, Grace's birth, her christening . . . the tornado," Myka finished with a small laugh. "It's easy to think, living in a city like New York, that nothing of import happens outside it or that things happen much more slowly. But every time we come back, so much has gone on in our absence." Her voice trailed off and then resumed with greater conviction. "And we, _I_ can do more in Sweetwater than New York. There we're just well-dressed ladies with money to spend on 'civic improvements,' and our contributions are dwarfed by others'. Here we can have a real impact –"

"The boys and I and Claudia, we'd love it if you and Helena lived here all year 'round," Liesl said gently, "but there's Christina and now the _Clarion_ , you have other claims on your attention."

Audra hadn't missed the hope that flashed in Liesl's eyes, and she was ashamed that her first response was to feel a recurrence of the resentment she had felt at recognizing that it was Myka, and not Helena, at the door. Myka walked in and not just the morning's cares but months' worth of sorrow and strain seemed to lift from Liesl. She even stood straighter. Ashamed, yes, but Audra wasn't so ashamed that she could make her leave taking less begrudging. "I have to get down to the _Journal_. You'll be all right? The boys and Grace aren't in need of anything?"

On cue, Grace began to wail, and Liesl's lips curled in a resigned half-smile. "Whatever she's in need of, Myka, Mary, and I can handle. You need to go before you cause Helena to miss the train." With an abrupt nod at Myka, Audra rose and began picking her way between the children, gobs of drying dough, and land masses of flour that made a short path to the screen door a domestic gauntlet. As she was opening the door to slip through, she felt a wooden handle being pressed into her hand. Audra didn't remember the basket or Liesl collecting items for a lunch, but the basket was heavy, and she knew without lifting the cloth covering it that it would be stuffed with sandwiches and pickles, fruit, and slices of cake or pie. "Lunch for the both of you. No sense in spending money on station food or what Halliday," Liesl sniffed dismissively, "may have to offer." The implication was clear that whatever Halliday did, in fact, offer, it couldn't match a Liesl Lattimer lunch, and with that Audra had to agree. Liesl said sternly, "I expect the basket to be empty when you come back."

Audra and Helena ate the lunch, gratefully, in the shed that was the _Free Press's_ office, waiting for its "liaison to the _Journal_ ," as Helena called Mr. Briggs, although Audra wouldn't have minded her calling him an editor, and his counterpart in Meridian to show up for a meeting that was supposed to have started a half-hour ago. They had walked from the station to the office more than an hour early for the meeting only to find a piece of paper thumbtacked to the weathered door with the cryptic message "In by noon." Helena, with a grim cast to her expression, tried the knob and, finding that it turned, opened the door – once she had put her shoulder to it. The first time Audra had visited this office, she had thought it resembled a cow shed, small, dark, and smelling of musty hay. She had seen no reason since to change her opinion.

Helena skirted the ancient letter press that had once produced the _Free Press_ and began tugging at a bench near the wall to draw it closer to the door. "We'll wait here for Mr. Briggs," she said, withdrawing a man's pocket watch from the depths of her skirt and checking the time. "The air's slightly less poisonous out here." On the cloth that had covered the basket, Helena spread out their lunch while Audra crossed the somnolent main street to buy two bottles of root beer at the general store. She wiped the dust off their necks with the sleeve of her dress.

As they ate, Audra expected their conversation to turn to the meeting, which was to discuss the decline in subscriptions and advertisements in Halliday and Meridian and what could be done to reverse it. She thought a good step might be for the men working for the paper to show up before noon, but she decided that mentioning it might only fuel Helena's anger. Helena wasn't trying to disguise her impatience, checking her watch frequently as noon passed and the half-hour neared with no sign of Mr. Briggs or, from Meridian, Mr. Truejoy. Her tone was light, however, as she asked after Grace and the boys, and she was especially amused by Audra's descriptions of Grace's fierce energy. "She has her father's inability to be still. Let's hope it's married to her mother's shrewdness."

"Liesl doesn't talk much about him, the sheriff . . . her husband," Audra said, blushing at both the obviousness of her prying and how awkwardly she introduced it. Had she always been this inept at coaxing information from a source? Maybe she hadn't been assigned to cover the ladies' committees (promoting education, hygiene, abstinence, and English classes for the immigrants) solely because she was a woman. She deserved the withering response that Helena was most likely to give her, but as Helena's silence continued longer than it should have, Audra thought silence was the response and answered her question herself. "She must find it too painful."

Helena was savoring the remains of a fried dumpling filled with strawberry preserves and dusted with powdered sugar, unashamedly licking her fingers. "They made a better match than I thought they would, and she still grieves his loss, but I wouldn't assume she doesn't talk about him because it's too painful. Maybe you should ask her and see what she says." Helena investigated the basket, hoping to find another dumpling. "If you're interested in tales about Pete Lattimer, I can tell you a few, although they won't be nearly as flattering as what you would hear from Liesl."

"I've learned he was a good man, who loved his family." Audra squinted down the street, searching for a sign of Mr. Briggs's arrival or Mr. Truejoy's, whose lateness might have been excused by distance had the meeting not been scheduled for a time that generously allowed for the inconvenience of coming from Meridian. "I don't need to know more than that, I guess. I said what I did because. . . ." Audra turned her face from Helena all the more sharply and squinted so hard that it might be possible she could see a plume of dust rising from Minneapolis, hundreds of miles away. "Because she's so warm and loving and pretty, yet she sees her future only in terms of being his widow and the mother of his children. Twenty years from now, I don't want to hear that she never found anyone else and lives only to dote on her grandchildren."

Helena let out a peal of genuinely amused laughter. "I don't think you'll have to worry about that, Audra. When Liesl's ready to find companionship she will, I assure you." Her tone changed, occupying an odd midpoint between slyness and sympathy. "Why are you so concerned with Liesl's happiness? Or is it that Dr. Napier's courtship has made you believe that everyone should be married?"

Audra knew without looking that Helena's mouth had twitched up in that maddeningly knowing way she had. "I'm not sure I want to be married, and Dr. Napier and I are just friends," she said coolly to put an end to Helena's teasing. "I'm Liesl's friend. Of course I want the best for her."

"There are friends, and then there are friends," Helena said, ignoring the rebuke. "I didn't understand the difference until one day," she softly amended, "one morning." Unable to hide her curiosity, Audra turned to face her. "Some 'printer's salve' applied to my hands made the difference unforgettably clear." Audra blinked at her, uncertain how printer's salve would be the determining factor in how intimate a friendship became. She half-expected to see Helena's lips twitch again, but if Helena believed she knew a secret, she was keeping the knowledge to herself this time. Instead Helena was glancing past her, and the sweetness that had stolen into her expression at the memory of the printer's salve was giving way to grim resolution. "Someday we'll continue this discussion, but I think our meeting is about to begin."

It began even before Mr. Briggs, returning from his visit to a fishing hole, a rod balanced on his shoulder but no fish in sight, joined them at entrance to the _Press's_ office. Helena, rising from the bench, made a production of looking at her watch, her words so icily enunciated that Audra could almost believe that the temperature had dropped. "You're 40 minutes late, Mr. Briggs. I hope you're more successful in casting for an explanation than you were at the creek."

Despite the crumbs from their lunch dotting her skirt and the dust streaked above its hem, Helena's measured walk – no more than a few steps – to close the distance between her and an obviously nervous Mr. Briggs suggested that she had stood up in umbrage from a throne rather than a poorly carpentered bench and was ready to pronounce judgment on her subject. Mr. Briggs might have gulped, his apology correspondingly garbled. Audra could make out only "sorry" and "track of time" but Helena seemed to have heard every word and none of them pleased her. He hurried ahead of them, leaning his rod against the wall and pulling the bench back inside the office. "As you can see," he offered half-heartedly, "things are pretty quiet here, have been for a while. Rather than sittin' around doing nothing, I thought –"

"You thought to waste my money by taking a self-declared holiday," Helena interrupted him.

"No, ma'am. There's just not been a lot of work," Mr. Briggs countered abjectly, using a soiled handkerchief to clean off the seat of a chair for her. Audra saw few of the boxes and stacks of paper that crowded the _Journal's_ office, and the letterpress had cobwebs strung between its supports. Although the _Free Press_ had been incorporated into the _Journal_ , there should have been the announcements, circulars, train schedules, and auction notices that supported Halliday's commercial and social activities and kept a printing press running even when there was no newspaper to publish. In their stead, Audra saw dust and, on a table that should have held those circulars and announcements, a layer of fish scales. At least Mr. Briggs had been using the table for something, although she suspected that Helena wouldn't find any humor in it.

The meeting lasted no longer than it took Helena to dramatically resurvey the room, hands on hips. She made a face at the appearance of the table and then strode to the letterpress, swiping the cobwebs away. She grimaced as she used Mr. Briggs's handkerchief to clean the dirt from her hands. "I think you and Mr. Truejoy may be in need of an assistant. Miss Clarke is too busy to do your and Mr. Lovejoy's jobs for you, so I'll have someone out here within the next few weeks. I expect you to provide him any help he needs in becoming . . . acclimated." Mr. Briggs was flushing with embarrassment, but he remained silent. Helena hadn't raised her voice but it filled the confines of the shed. "In the meantime, we'll be expecting regular reports on your efforts to increase subscriptions and revenue. You can send them to Miss Clarke's attention at the _Journal's_ office." At this, Mr. Briggs attempted to protest, but Helena held a finger up in warning. "I'm being merciful, Mr. Briggs, because you still have your job. If you think otherwise, you're free to submit your resignation." With a jerk of her head to signal that the meeting was over, she left the shed with the same regal air with which she had entered it, Audra trailing after her, feeling like a lady in waiting. Once outside, Helena didn't slow, marching toward the train station. "I think we can still catch the 2:00 train back to Sweetwater."

Half-expecting Helena to inform her that an assistant would be coming out to "help" her as well, which Audra suspected would result in an assumption of her responsibilities and not a sharing of them, she regretted not visiting Halliday and Meridian more often and taking a firmer stance with Messrs. Briggs and Truejoy who, in theory if in no other realm, answered to her. Their communications to her had diminished in direct proportion to the towns' shrinking readership, but she had had her own battles to wage, if not with the balky press then with the need to get the papers delivered, the invoices prepared and sent, the editorials and articles written, all within the precious few hours allotted to a day. None of that included the time she spent printing coupons for Mr. Burns to capriciously distribute in the Emporium, updated train schedules for posting at the train station, notices for revival meetings or for lectures to be given by missionaries fresh from foreign lands. Yet being able to manage it all was what she had promised Helena and Myka she could do, and she was failing. What made it worse was that she was doing little more, perhaps no more, than Myka had done when she had been in charge of the _Journal_. Audra couldn't shut out the image of Myka at the breakfast table, elegant and serene, and Liesl, her pleasure at the visit making her eager and bashful both, like a smitten girl.

"You _do_ need an assistant," Helena said, shifting to find a comfortable position on the seat. "I'm not unhappy with you, Audra, if that's what you're thinking. Sweetwater is doubling in size by the day, it seems, and the _Journal's_ office shows it. While I don't like tripping over boxes or sending posters to the floor, at least I know the chaos is productive." She stared out the window next to her, finding something of interest in the unvarying scene of prairie grass, turned brown by the drought, and, above it, birds wheeling in lazy circles, searching for prey. "What we need to introduce to Halliday and Meridian is the same kind of energy," she said. "I'm hoping that the cousin Josef has recommended can be the spark for it." She turned her gaze to Audra, her expression lighter, amused. "One of my best employees – although I believe my business partner, Irene, would argue that he's hers – has been blessed with an overabundance of family. There's always been a nephew or cousin when I've needed someone with Josef's drive and tenacity, but few of them have wanted to venture farther west than the Hudson River. However, Josef has assured me that Anton has a desire to see the wide, open spaces. I hope you're agreeable to him working in the _Journal's_ office before he's sent to Halliday? He's not unfamiliar with newspapers, but he will be very unfamiliar with this." Helena gestured at the windows and the virtual emptiness of prairie and sky beyond them. "You know what a shock this will be."

That was one way to describe it, although Audra thought "shock" made it sound as though the enormity of the difference seized you before passing, like a fever, and it wasn't like that. The vastness, the quietness, the loneliness, they didn't jar you, they simply ground you down. She hadn't gotten out of bed every morning newly disappointed that Sweetwater wasn't New York. For days, even weeks, she might think nothing of the fact that she had seen no more than 20 people during all that time, the same 20 people, or that the loudest noise in Sweetwater was often the wind. It might cross her mind that she had seen no one in town she didn't know by name since a drummer from Omaha had tried to sell her a "ladies' elixir," proof, he had vociferously claimed, against all female complaints, but she didn't rail against the monotony. When she could predict almost word for word how the barber would greet her when he swept out his shop in the mornings, she didn't fall to the floor of the _Journal's_ office and beg for deliverance. She concentrated on the features of her life as she lived it now that didn't threaten to drive her mad, the sunrises and sunsets, which surpassed in the beauty of their composition any painting she had ever seen; the _Journal_ , which, despite being a source of almost constant frustration, was the challenge that made her look forward to each day; Liam's courtly manners and Helena's brisk dismissal of the niceties; kuchenrolle; Gus's calling her Owdie and the seriousness with which Will would ask her for her opinion. When all that wasn't enough, and she felt that if she walked out far enough into the prairie that its grasses would rise above her head like water and she would be seen no more, she would recall Liesl reading to her, her voice adapting to the characters' personalities but always, at base, steady and unhurried, even when she was playing Sherlock Holmes. Audra clung to it like she might a line thrown to her to lead her back to shore.

"He'll adjust," Audra said. "I did."

"It also helps," Helena said much too casually, "if you can find that one person who makes everything better. Do you think that's in the cards for you, Audra?"

"I survived a tornado. I suppose anything's possible."

They would have arrived back in Sweetwater far earlier than they had expected if the train had not been stopped on the tracks for several hours as the engineer and fireman tried to resolve a mechanical problem. It was resolved to the extent that the train could resume its journey, but only at half-speed. Consequently, the evening shadows were long when the train arrived at the Sweetwater station, and though Audra invited Helena to share the supper Liesl would have saved for her, Helena declined, declaring that "a bath and a brandy are all I need." Throwing her head back, as if her weariness was one more obstacle to surmount, she promised that she would be at the house early in the morning to see Grace and to talk to Liesl about baking for a large supper party that she and Myka were planning to host. Under the station's light, she winked at Audra, as if to confirm Audra's understanding of the party's purpose. It was the first that Audra had heard of the party, but she feared that if she admitted it, they would remain under the light, insects buzzing around them, as Helena explained her latest plans for waking the town's somnolent conscience.

She nodded in understanding, and Helena, with a quick farewell, stepped off the platform. Even in the dark, the imposing lines of her house were unmistakable, giving emphatic punctuation to the straggling line of the main street. Audra felt no dissatisfaction in turning toward her more modest home, which, she reminded herself, was hers only on loan, for as long as remained the _Journal's_ editor. Yet the reminder didn't make it feel any less like her home, and she couldn't imagine living anywhere else in Sweetwater. She didn't just live in that house, she knew it, it spoke to her. The creaking of the stairs and the creaking of the floorboards sounded different registers, the former, sharp and complaining, while the latter was low-pitched and companionable. The house sighed at night as it released the day's heat, and the groans of the pipes in the washroom and kitchen of a morning expressed her own reluctance at having to get out of bed. It would murmur to her later tonight as she walked with Grace. While the house's conversing with her lacked Liesl's softness, it was almost as reassuring.

But as she crossed the back porch, the only noise was the whine of the screen door as she opened it. The children were in their beds and even Bruno was curled up on the rug in the hallway. Liesl was waiting for her in the parlor, and while she made a pretense of frowning as Audra brought her dinner plate with her into the room, she didn't send her back to eat at the kitchen table. Audra related to her the outcome of the meeting and the onerousness of the train delay, describing how Helena had dressed down a man who towered over her yet laughed and traded riddles as she played an impromptu game of slapjack with some children on the train. "You admire her," Liesl said, more as a statement than a question, but Audra had only shrugged. Opening the _Memoirs_ without further comment, Liesl paged to the beginning of "The Adventure of the _Gloria Scott_."

"'I have some papers here,' said my friend Sherlock Holmes as we sat one winter's night on either side of the fire, 'which I really think, Watson, that it would be your while to glance over. These are the documents in the extraordinary case of the _Gloria Scott_ , and this is the message which struck Justice of the Peace Trevor dead with horror when he read it.'" Liesl paused. "It must have been quite a message," she said dryly. "Do you think Dr. Watson will guess what it means?"

"He hasn't gotten much right before," Audra said, resting her legs on the ottoman and sinking deeper into the armchair. "I don't expect he will this time either. Sherlock will have to explain it." She took a tiny bite of lemon cake. The frosting was white but thick with grated lemon peel. If she ate slowly and in small bites, she might make the cake last the length of the story. She enjoyed the race every evening between her consumption of dessert and Liesl's reading of a story. She almost always finished ahead of her. Tonight would be no different, and the thought made her smile.

Catching the smile, Liesl looked questioningly at her, but Audra shook her head. Liesl searched the page until she found her place. The tale went on, and Audra closed her eyes, not completely, just enough so all she could see through the fringe of her lashes was the light on Liesl's hair. The gold of the table lamp's glow was no match for it. Before morning it would be spilling over Audra's shoulder, and she would lightly touch the strands, wondering how Liesl had managed to persuade the sun into giving part of itself away.


End file.
